Is there anything to find on bin Laden's hard drive? US officials are already referring to the trove of computer drives and disks seized from Osama bin Laden's compound as “the mother lode of intelligence.” Such gloating is probably premature. As reported by Politico and others, the US Navy SEAL team that killed bin Laden on Sunday in Pakistan snatched computers, thumb drives and …
when I mended a local's video recorder in riyadh a while ago I was unexpectedly given a half-bottle of scotch. I don't think the guy was a paid-up member of the made-up AQ, but he was definitely a pillar of the community and no doubt a supporter of the neighborhood Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Being a normal Saudi local he was a bit bipolar on most issues. Kim Philby's dad, Harry Saint John Bridger Sheik Abdullah Philby stated that "(Saudi/Nejd) Arabs are the only people I know of who combine ignorance with arrogance"
I also met a champagne salesman in riyadh, he said business was very good. The only beer available was tinnies of "Near" (zero alcohol flavored with cat's p!ss) but once the factory accidentally brewed real stuff.... I suspect UBL would have been a sweet-mint-tea persona
Ever been on a flight out of Saudi. Full of ladies with full guiness bottle robes drinking orange juice. The pilot announces we are now out of Saudi airspace and there is a rush for the toilets. Several minutes later the ladies return in the shortest miniskirts I have seen outside a porn movie, and proceed to get staggeringly drunk.
What is done officially and what is done privately are totally different.
That was a quite a common report well before the 80s, a frequent one was that their grand piano was leaking as it was said that they regularly imported new ones as the heat made them go off tune...
I did once see a container being packed for export,(not in this country) with the boxes being labelled as Navy Documents relating to 'another country'. The contents had to avoid clinking and the 'documents' were square section with a screw top, they were not for 'our' embassy but for delivery to the same Kingdom.
Not asking questions would be a useful step.
But, on the ground in Pakistan is a bit different. I think it is more like a bird in the hand versus two in the bush.
I do not doubt the report that he was given a chance to surrendar. Which he would naturally not take. Then, he gets popped a couple of times. MIssion accomplished. Now, let's get out of here with the body. And anything else that is not nailed down.
We can work on anything that is not plain paper.
The world may not be a safer place. But, it sure feels like it.
"Maybe if they hadn't killed him, they could have 'extracted' some data from him."
Perhaps that's what they're doing right now. I mean, It would make sense to keep him alive without anybody knowing, and milk him for all the info he's got. It wouldn't surprise me if the 'secret burial at sea' was just a cover up. This way, they could get all the info they want from him without any outside interference from AI or the UN or whoever. It also would prevent his buddies trying to free him through some massive kidnapping.
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I know some types of people can't understand this, but here it goes:
Interrogation != torture
Until they say exactly who gave the info and under which conditions (fat chance), we won't know, of course. But we DO know, from the reports of ex-operatives, that non-violent, even friendly interrogation gives results while torture tends to get made up crap.
From the "Tips and Tricks" section:
Don't let on that you live in a swank walled compound with toilets and access to real food when those who would die in your name live in caves eating bugs. It's bad form and may cause resentment among your underlings.
after 10 years of smashing his encryption with the worlds most powerful super computer array, the NSA today confirmed that they now have full access to bin-ladens world of warcraft account, the top 10 islamic i tunes and 9 1/2 years worth of downloads from bombay badonka-donks.
What do you think those couriers were couriering?
IMHO, I think it's just as likely that there is a wealth of unprotected or lightly protected info on his machine as it being either empty or completely locked down like that suspected bank embezzler guy in Brazil. Bin Laden *might* not have spent as much time and effort considering/planning what happens when he was found and killed vs. trying not to get caught. The little I could find on Mujahideen Secrets (http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/2008/01/mujahideen-secrets-2-encryption-tool.html) seemed more geared towards data in transit (say, for e-mail) than data at rest (whole disk encryption).
If I had to wager I'd bet that the thumb drives were encrypted but the machines themselves at best had whole disk encryption with a relatively weak password, if not completely unprotected.
You massively overstate the strength of encryption. It's only as good as the key management, and any of the products you mentioned have poor key entry (basically, they expect you to type it in), leading to key lengths maybe a hundred times less than required to resist any brute force attack for more than a few days.
If you are right and there is a "trove" of items, then the likelihood is that they are not encrypted. Again it comes back to key management. Can you imagine OBL keeping track of 20 odd random passphrases in his head? It's easy to encrypt one item, harder to do two, and so on. The existence of a "trove" strongly suggests a lack of crypto or (even worse) key reuse.
It seems completely unlikely, especially if in the context of an everyday person, but he wasn't an everyday person. His computer may well hold secrets that could affect terrorist operations around the world, and they could also have been used as evidence if he was taken to a trial. If you're determined it's not difficult to force yourself to memorise about 20 different passphrases, just time consuming, so I'd guess for a smart (smarter than the average person I'd wager) guy who fears for his life and may even believe wholeheartedly in his cause and fear for it more, spending a few days or a week thoroughly planting them in his head wouldn't be too much of a chore.
I can remember the lyrics to many popular, and some less than popular tunes. A line or two from one of them would be sufficient. Music can be a powerful memory aid!
Plenty of people can remember the opening or closing lines to famous novels.
A more obvious (perhaps too obvious?) source would be a few lines from the Qu'ran, which presumably he would have already learnt by heart.
In short: No, its easy to remember a pass phrase long enough.
There's several complications here, to do with the languages used, but the core point is that text, whether English or Arabic, isn't random. There are sequences of characters which happen a lot, and sequences which never happen. So, while it can be remembered more easily, a password or key is easier to attack than its length would suggest.
If he used a passage from the Koran, it would be relatively easy to brute-force. It's not that huge a key-space. Printed editions run between 200 and 400 pages, depending on edition, and it is roughly the same size as the Christian New Testament. An 8-character alphanumeric password list is a few billion pages long.
(Checks page-count estimate)
Lots bigger, if you want to get technical. OK?
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