Osama Bin Laden Didn't Encrypt His Files

An anonymous reader writes "If you're running a terrorist organization, it might make sense to encrypt your files. Clearly Osama Bin Laden didn't realize that — as some of the documents seized during the raid on his hideout in Pakistan have been made public for the first time. 17 electronic documents, which were found on USB sticks, memory cards and computer hard drives after US Navy Seals killed the terrorist chief in the May 2011 raid, are being released in their original Arabic alongside English translations by the Combating Terrorism Center, reports Sophos."

Comments

No real need for him to encrpyt

[Nidi62]

Why would he need to encrypt files he was storing with him? He was living covertly, so did not have to worry about surveillance. And these documents were essentially for internal (read: his own and his few insiders) use. Any distribution of those documents from his location was handled by courier, and AQ uses encryption and steganography when distributing their documents as recent news has shown, logically the same measures were probably undertaken whenever these documents left the compound. As high a profile target as he is, he really didn't have to worry about anyone snooping on him, it would be much more profitable to capture or kill him if his location were known than it would be to sit on him and investigate traffic. And odds are the NSA and other intelligence agencies would brute force and eventually crack any encryption regardless. At best, all the encryption would do is buy time for AQ to bug out/scrap plans/accelerate operations. In all likelihood they probably had a contingency plan for bin Laden's eventual capture/death(whether natural or by bullet/missile) which involved changes in methods, distribution networks, or locations, causing any intelligence gained to lead to mostly ghosts and cold trails.

Think of this another way: do you encrypt your USB drives if you are just transferring your files from one computer to another in your house? Even if the files are sensitive, it's a waste of time, because the drive isn't intended to be removed from your house.

Re:And Still

[icebraining]

Personally I think he has been dead for years now. It makes more sense than the alternatives, in my opinion.

Not that I really care or have a strong opinion.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Andtalath]

Actually, it's paranoid delusions that correlate with a high intelligence somewhat.
Or, to be more precise, elaborate paranoid delusions.

Paranoid Scizophrenia occurs through the entire spectrum and should NOT be confused with general paranoia.
I've met both categories, the difference between the two is that one chooses his own beliefs (no matter how flawed) over the official explanations, even the ones from peer-reviewed research, often due to a misunderstanding of what is being said, but also quite often since we are being taught simple "truths" due to the fact that the complex truths are quite hard to explain to non-professionals in a given field.

Let me put it this way, I know a guy who, when ANYTHING is annoying/unexplained he blames "them".
His shirts have shrunk?
UN did it.
His camera is slightly out of wack in settings from what he remembers from using it the last time?
THEY did it, fortunately, he's vigilant enough to notice it and thus it didn't work.

This sounds like I'm making it up, but, no, he's DEAD set on these things, confronting him on these, for him, extremely important details makes him certain that you are one of "them".
And no, I'm not in a position where I can avoid him and I'm not in a position where I can help him.

My point is that paranoid delusions are, generally, things that in some way make sense AND is not trivial to circumvent while scizo is definitely NOT sensible.
Meaning, they have fully formed arguments about them and they also generally work well in society as well (even if extreme cases like Anders Behring Breivik exist (a current terrorist in Norway, complex case up in the courts right now)), most importantly, they can generally NOT be "cured" by drugs while scizoid people can (although temporarily, and only of the scizoid part, so the paranoia may remain).
Psychologists generally don't treat paranoid people since, well, they are generally well-adjusted and can hold a job and so forth.

Paranoid scizos often freak out when confronted, meaning, they generally avoid discussion on the internet unless they are sure they can't be argued against.

Terrorists: Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, Scientist

[cold fjord]

We aren't talking rocket scientists here. . . . . The "terrorist" are middle east versions of neo-nazi rednecks.

I'm afraid you've got things quite wrong in some important ways.

The Educated Muslim Terrorist

Nidal Hasan, Abdulmutallab and Humam al-Balawi are jihadists who were educated and came from privileged middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Hasan was an American-trained U. S. Army doctor, Abdulmutallab was a London engineering student and the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker, and double-agent Dr. Humam al-Balawi was a member of the Jordanian professional class.

Many Westerners are confused by the willingness of university-educated middle-class Muslims to perpetrate barbarous acts of terrorism. It appears to be a reversal of the usual process: typically college students raised in religious households become more secularized by exposure to the humanities and sciences, and the rationalist values of the European Enlightenment. Yet when embryonic jihadists attend Western universities they graduate with their faith intact: 9/11 terrorists Mohammed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were both beneficiaries of Western university educations. These men, who sought to advance themselves with Western training and technical skills, ultimately turned against, and attempted to destroy, the very society that provided them with the means to that advancement. Instead of employing their newly acquired learning and knowledge to improve the lot of their fellow countrymen and co-religionists, they turned this very learning and knowledge against their Western benefactors.

This phenomenon begs the question: How do jihadists reconcile such hypocrisy and ingratitude in their own minds?

As the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie proved, the list of Jihad’s grievances against the West is subtle and inventive. The exquisite sensitivities of the faithful guarantee the manufacture of injury and insult without end, providing inspiration for Islam’s perennial street theater; for no sooner does the Arab street grow tired of one threadbare grievance, e.g. Israel, than it discovers another in an irreverent Danish cartoon. . . . .

In Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century, Marc Sageman notes that eruptions of terrorist violence have little to do with economic social conditions; terrorist movements evolve slowly, spike quickly, and disappear with unexpected suddenness, and “cannot be explained through slow-moving societal forces and cultural templates.” Sageman disputes the popular notion that terrorists are mentally ill, poor, uneducated sociopaths: most of the 9/11 terrorist were, like Mohammed Atta, well-educated, many of them university graduates, i.e. psychologically stable individuals from middle-class families. Most telling of all, four fifths of these jihadists were expatriates, or the offspring of expatriates, who had immigrated to the West. In a word, they were members of the intelligentsia, confirming Arnold Toynbee’s observation that this class is fertile ground for revolutionary violence. . . . More

What Makes a Terrorist

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, policymakers, scholars, and ordinary citizens asked a key question: What would make people willing to give up their lives to wreak mass destruction in a foreign land? In short, what makes a terrorist?

A popular explanation was that economic deprivation and a lack of education caused people to adopt extreme views and turn to terrorism. For example, in July 2005, after the bombings of the London transit system, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, “Ultimately what we now know, if we did not before