Slashdot Mirror
Bin Laden's Sneakernet Email System
Hugh Pickens writes "Osama bin Laden was a prolific writer who put together a painstaking email system that thwarted the US government's best eavesdroppers despite having no Internet access in his hideout. Holed up in his walled compound in northeast Pakistan with no phone or Internet capabilities, bin Laden would type a message on his computer, save it using a thumb-sized flash drive that he passed to a trusted courier, who would head for a distant Internet cafe. At that location, the courier would plug the drive into a computer, copy bin Laden's message into an email and send it. Intelligence officials are wading through thousands of the email exchanges after around 100 flash drives were seized from the compound by US Navy Seals."
The term sneakernet harkens back to the early days of computing where the only way to get information was to put it on a disk and walk it over to another computer and load it there. Thus a network using your sneakers (your shoes) as the transportation method. So this would be partially true for this instance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet