FC: WorldNetDaily reports WTC-Pentagon terrorists used encryption

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://www.wartimeliberty.com/article.pl?sid=01/09/21/2220202

   WorldNetDaily Reports WTC Terrorists Used Encryption
   posted by admin on Friday September 21, @05:17PM

   There must be something about encryption and terrorists in
   the same graf that makes levelheaded journalists go nutty. Just take a
   compelling -- if only because it's so strange -- article posted
   Thursday on the conservative WorldNetDaily news site. It claims,
   implausibly, that Osama bin Laden "has the NSA beat on the employment
   front, hiring the best computer experts on the market." One allegedly
   is Nabil Khan Kani, a Syrian living in Barcelona. Kani's supposedly
   the author of some data-hiding steganography products that have been
   giving U.S. spies fits. An excerpt: "Computer and terrorism experts
   suggest that the missing Syrian computer whiz was the author of the
   technology known as steganography... This technology enables users to
   bypass electronic monitoring by hiding messages randomly in seemingly
   innocent digital files, such as music files, those of the popular
   online marketplace eBay, pornographic files or even e-mail headers...
   U.S. intelligence has been unable to trace their authors and
   recipients in the three years since first detecting evidence of their
   existence in the files of the bin Laden organization. U.S. agencies
   now believe that the attacks in New York and Washington were
   coordinated through those encrypted electronic messages, which were
   opened by 'key' holders. They also believe that terrorists are in
   possession of all or part of the codes used by the Drug Enforcement
   Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office, Air Force
   Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, Marine Corps
   Intelligence and the intelligence offices of the State Department and
   Department of Energy." Watch for Sen. Judd "Anti-Crypto" Gregg to
   cite this report in a floor speech.




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