
Osama bin Laden raid yields trove of (not encrypted?) computer data. - crocowhile
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54151.html
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wilschroter
There was talk that this information may expose deliberate ties to the
financiers of Al Quida including Saudi royalty. Not that this is new
information per se, but awfully damning evidence if its found on the hard
drive of bin Laden.

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crocowhile
From the article:

“Hundreds of people are going through it now,” an official said, adding that
intelligence operatives back in Washington are very excited to find out what
they have.

This suggests data were not encrypted, I guess. Amazing.

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jaredwill
Not all super villains have tech goons that read Hacker News

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rms
Even if they were using encryption, it was probably the kind the US government
can very easily break.

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16s
News reports claim that the FBI has said that they can not crack TrueCrypt.

[http://news.techworld.com/security/3228701/fbi-hackers-
fail-...](http://news.techworld.com/security/3228701/fbi-hackers-fail-to-
crack-truecrypt/)

Some people argue that they _want to encourage the use of certain_ encryption
products (e.g. Clipper chips) while others argue they are being honest about
their capabilities being limited in the face of strong encryption.

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JonnieCache
What the FBI, and all security services are really interested in, is FUD.

This is the same reason why they've never issued a denial about aliens at area
51, the same reason that they make random comments about truecrypt out of the
blue, the same reason they've never released all the CCTV footage from the
pentagon on 9/11 even though they could, the non denials around ECHELON,
HAARP, etc. etc. etc.

They'd much prefer people keep wasting energy guessing about the infinite
space of "unknown unknowns" than spending time talking about the less
titillating abuses that happen in plain sight.

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16s
The amazing part to me is that the reports say there was no internet
connectivity and no phone lines running into the compound. Did they have an
internal network? Or, were these all just stand-alone computers where they
kept notes?

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lucasjung
This doesn't surprise me at all: the guy was notoriously paranoid and wouldn't
have wanted any kind of electronic tether that Americans could have
potentially used to trace back to him. Never mind how plausible such a
scenario actually is, in his mind it was a threat.

I'd bet that he had a dedicated sneaker-net servicing his compound with high
bandwidth and acceptable (to him) latency.

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aj700
Now we should call this usability problem "Why [even] Osammy Can't Encrypt"

<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/8/114540/8364>

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astrodust
"One of the choppers developed a mechanical problem that caused it to lose
lift[...] When he couldn’t get the bird airborne again, the SEALs blew it up
and left in one of the reserves."

What the hell? Is this Battlefield 2 or a multi-million dollar piece of
hardware?

~~~
michaelcampbell
Was that area considered hostile territory? (I honestly don't know.) Maybe the
Pakistanis said they couldn't help, so they blew it up to keep anything from
getting into foreign hands?

~~~
artmageddon
They landed in the compound where the fighting took place, and that's where
the helo went down. There's no point in letting the enemy being able to strip
down / repair one of your aircraft and use it against you.

