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

Security through obscurity

[GodfatherofSoul]

Worked pretty well for the 10 or so years it took to *find* his files!

Re:Security through obscurity

[Anonymous Coward]

All interested groups--those who would benefit from him being alive and those who would benefit from him being dead--agree that he's dead. His family members, including his wives, agree that he's dead. The Pakistani government, angry that the US violated their sovereignty, and embarrassed that OBL was in an area known to senior members of their intelligence apparatus (IE they were caught with their pants down), agree that he's dead. The consequences of claiming he's dead when he's not would be disastrous. A non-trivial number of people (between those in the situation room, including a photographer, those on the SEAL team, those on the ship that the SEAL team flew to) would be able to blow the whistle on the conspiracy.

This isn't about legal standard of proof--if it was ever legally required the government would show the court some of the DNA, dental, photographic, and video evidence they have--it's about simple common sense.

If you believe Osama bin Laden is not dead, say so. If you believe these documents are not legitimate, say so. This kind of wishy-washy devil's advocate crap where people claim that there are "unanswered questions" but lack the intellectual honesty to actually stand behind the only possible conclusion that could be drawn by the answers they're implying is so stupid.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Black Parrot]

Is this FreeRepublic.com now?

~S

Yes, but we're still arguing over whether it's Free Beer Republic or Free Speech Republic.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have no idea ..."

You could have stopped right there.

Re:Security through obscurity

[zero.kalvin]

So getting killed for not encrypting your files is the new punishment ? God those IT admins are angry!

Re:Security through obscurity

[Nidi62]

Is this FreeRepublic.com now?

~S

Yes, but we're still arguing over whether it's Free Beer Republic or Free Speech Republic.

Free Beer Republic. Because that way you'll be so drunk you won't care and will say whatever you want regardless.

Re:Security through obscurity

[tnk1]

Jumping too soon on a story (ie. Chavez Out of Power, Dewey Defeats Truman), is hardly the same thing as just about every one else telling you that OBL is dead. The fact of Chavez being in and out of power is a much more fluid situation than Osama bin Laden with two holes in his chest and having been dumped in the Indian Ocean off the deck of a warship. With Chavez, they were simply wrong, with bin Laden, they'd have to be outright lying.

Fact is, you don't really get to keep nasty secrets like this for long. Just about everything the US government or its agents have ever done which is nasty or illicit has come out long before any sort of National Archives release date. Even Nixon couldn't cover his shit up. If OBL was not dead or it was a fake, it would come out. It might be for honesty, it might be for a huge payday, or it might just be for ego.

Documentation is fine, but it can be faked. In the end, you don't trust in documents, you trust in the preponderance of evidence that you get from a variety of diverse sources, including those who have no stake in telling lies. As someone pointed out, both the US government and AQ admitted OBL is dead. I don't see any reason to disbelieve them. It's not like it changed anything at all. No wars will end, no wars will start. Hell, it was even too soon to allow Obama to get an Election year bump in the polls.

Re:Security through obscurity

[MightyYar]

This place has always attracted the conspiracy-minded. I think that there are more high-IQ people here than average, and high-IQ people like to find patterns. There is also a high correlation between paranoid schizophrenia and IQ. Conspiracy theories are really just grand pattern-finding exercises.

Of course, no one espousing these theories can explain to me how the government manages to keep a secret.

Re:Security through obscurity

[plover]

Because if Emmanuel Goldstein hadn't existed, it would have been necessary to invent him.

(Apologies to Orwell and Voltaire.)

Re:Security through obscurity

[flyingsquid]

This place has always attracted the conspiracy-minded. I think that there are more high-IQ people here than average, and high-IQ people like to find patterns. There is also a high correlation between paranoid schizophrenia and IQ. Conspiracy theories are really just grand pattern-finding exercises.

So you're saying that this forum naturally attracts conspiracy theorists and gives them a place to vent their conspiracies. That would be awfully convenient if there was an organization working in the shadows that needed to monitor people's communications to make sure that none of the conspiracy theorists had accidentally stumbled onto the truth. All they'd have to do is monitor this forum and then disappear anybody who got too close. Awfully convenient indeed....

Perfectly hypothetical, of course. Anyway, I'd write more but I have to go, it's 2:00 AM and for some reason somebody is banging on my door and I better see who it is.

Re:Security through obscurity

[Compaqt]

You forgot the #!#NO CARRIER

Re:Security through obscurity

[interkin3tic]

You sound like one of those people who actually believe we landed on the moon! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!

Re:Security through obscurity

[JustOK]

Forgot the what???? OMG, they got Compaqt !

Re:Security through obscurity

[V-similitude]

Actually, it turns out that Osama bin Laden was just a really really deep cover FBI agent, trying to entice people into committing terrorist acts in order to later arrest them.

Re:Security through obscurity

[rtb61]

The unanswered question is, why the claim of justifiable execution when they had him captured when the majority of the planet wanted him in trial.

Forget the bullshit about risk, that is just bullshit. By far the majority wanted to see him paraded before the public, lead around in handcuffs, reduced to nothing but just another criminal on trial. They wanted to see the evidence, they wanted all the accusations out in the open and, they wanted to understand how a US government funded agent become an anti-US terrorist.

They wanted the details, they wanted the truth they absolutely did not want some bullshit stage photo shoot of Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton sitting around a room with the co-conspirators pretending to watch it live, what a crock of shit. We by law had the right to our bloody trial, we had the right to all the evidence, we had the right to know everything that went on and we had the right to track all the government failings of the.

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.

really?

[SailorOrion]

Normally, you would encrypt data for transmission via an unsecure network (read: internet) or to protect it from unauthorized physical access. It's not like OBL's biggest worries were the contents of his USB sticks should hostile individuals be present in his home. History certainly supports that theory ...

Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/538/

Why bother with the inconvenience?

[dccase]

He correctly understood that they wouldn't be used against him as evidence in a court of law.

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:You're kidding right?

[Nidi62]

Unless of course you really think that any of this happened, in which you are hopelessly retarded! The only thing that might be true is that he's dead, probably in the Tora Bora attack years ago.

If bin Laden died in the Tora Bora years ago, Bush would have played that card when he was losing a bunch of domestic and international credibility after Iraq. That would have taken a lot of heat off of him and make it much easier for him to have gotten things done. Although, judging by your comment you probably also think bin Laden was a CIA agent since the 80s too.

Two thougths:

[Guppy06]

1. Considering that he kept that information in close physical proximity, he may simply have assumed that, if the information were compromised, he wouldn't be alive to care.
2. The US government says the files weren't encrypted. It's also possible they were encrypted, but the US doesn't want al Qaeda cells and/or the general public to know how long it took to crack.

Don't forget steganography

[Chuck Chunder]

I bet that "evil plans" sub directory is really a front and there's some serious man on man action pictures hidden inside those files.

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

Alive he would have been a rallying point

[Shivetya]

dead he is a short term martyr at best.

What nation could try him let alone hold him? The US? Hell we would have enough people who regularly post here decrying that let alone people protesting everywhere.

Then when you try him exactly who is going to want to keep him? Which country wants a permanent living flashpoint in their borders?

For every reason I could see taking him alive I can find many more for having him dead. There are people in this world who simply serve no purpose in keeping alive. Yes it is a sad observation but until people acknowledge that the world isn't going to get far. You cannot simply wish people to be good. Some just are not fit to be part of society, some merely see society as something to destroy.

I guess it would make some people feel better about themselves, magnanimous even, to hold these types indefinitely but I find the who generally want this have no skin in the game to begin with.