[TankGirl]

Thanks WT, an excellent news package!

This story was particularly interesting:

Originally posted by walktalker
How the terror trail went unseen
Investigations into how the terror attackers managed to evade detection are producing the unusual situation that statements from the FBI have become more trustworthy than those in the press. In two successive briefings, senior FBI officials have stated that the agency has as yet found no evidence that the hijackers who attacked America used electronic encryption methods to communicate on the internet. But this has not prevented politicians and journalists repeating lurid rumours that the coded orders for the attack were secretly hidden inside pornographic web images, or from making claiming that the hijacks could have been prevented if only western governments had been given the power to prevent internet users from using secret codes.
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/9751/1.html

From the story:

Throughout the period, US intelligence did track bin Laden's satphone. They heard him talking to the Taliban about heroin exports, and even monitored him chatting to his mother. Tracking data based on the position of his phone was used in 1998, when President Clinton authorised the launch of cruise missiles intended to kill him. But he wasn't logged on, and survived. And he never logged on again.

Although politicians have rushed to blame new technology, intelligence experts say that the real problem has been getting agents inside the terror groups. They say that the CIA has been inexcusably lazy by failing to recruit and run agents who were willing to risk dirt, disease and death by joining the terror teams at their training camps. But without the information from such sources on who and what to look for, America's vast global arsenal of satellites and listening centres, like the giant satellite spy base at Menwith Hill near Harrogate, England, and Bad Aibling, Bavaria, were blind and deaf.

British foreign secretary Jack Straw's suggestion that the inventors and promoters of computer security now regret what they have done also appears misleading. One of the most famous of these experts is Dr Whitfield Diffie from California, who jointly helped invent the system now used as the foundation of internet business. Speaking at a security conference in Ireland last week, he said "the internet is so valuable as a communication mechanism that people and corporations cannot afford not to use it ... it's only cryptography [secret codes] that makes it safe."

The evidence so far is that, when communicating, the terrorists used simple open codes to conceal who and what they were talking about. This low-tech method works. Unless given leads about who to watch, even the vast "Echelon" network run by NSA and GCHQ cannot separate such messages from innocuous traffic. The problem, says Dr Gladman, is that "the volume of communications is killing them [the spy agencies]. They just can't keep up. It's not about encryption."

"Events have vindicated our position", adds Ian Miller, a computer security specialist and one of the experts whom Mr Straw has accused of being "naïve". The attacks, he said, worked because they had "none of the hallmarks of clandestine activity the intelligence agencies normally look for. They did nothing suspicious - until they did something abominable".

- tg