In this day and age if you are trying to track someone down then looking for activity online and an associated IP location may be your best bet. But that didn’t happen with Osama Bin Laden even though he regularly sent out emails. So how did he do it?
His compound didn’t even have a phone line let alone a dedicated line for broadband, but Bin Laden was in possession of a computer. Instead of hooking up to the web, he decided to remain offline and instead employed a courier to take his emails to a working conenction away from where he was hiding.
The communications were loaded on to a USB stick by a trusted person within his network. That stick would then travel to a location where the messages could be sent and then responses were uploaded to the same stick for delivery back to Bin Laden.
While this method of communication is slow, it meant there was never any trace of Bin Laden’s location when the messages were sent. However, now he is dead and his computer has been seized, U.S. officials have gained access to thousands of those messages and their responses. There are thought to be more than 100 drives full of this information.
For those in contact with Bin Laden it must be a worrying time. The U.S. now has hundreds of email addresses and phone numbers as well as a lot of detail about events that have either taken place or were being planned. Some of that could lead to prosecutions, and at the very least a lot of disruption to the terrorist network.
