Forged Documents and Microsoft Fonts
A set of documents in Pakistan were detected as forgeries because their fonts were not in circulation at the time the documents were dated.
Entries Tagged "Pakistan"
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BlackBerry Leaves Pakistan Rather Than Provide a Government Backdoor
BlackBerry has chosen to shut down operations in Pakistan rather than provide the government with backdoor access to encrypted communications.
Pakistan is a relatively small market, but still.
EDITED TO ADD (12/14): Another news article.
The Cost of Terrorism in Pakistan
This study claims “terrorism has cost Pakistan around 33.02% of its real national income” between the years 1973 and 2008, or about 1% per year.
The St. Louis Fed puts the real gross national income of the U.S. at about $13 trillion total, hand-waving an average over the past few years. The best estimate I’ve seen for the increased cost of homeland security in the U.S. in the ten years since 9/11 is $100 billion per year. So that puts the cost of terrorism in the US at about 0.8%—surprisingly close to the Pakistani number.
The interesting thing is that the expenditures are completely different. In Pakistan, the cost is primarily “a fall in domestic investment and lost workers’ remittances from abroad.” In the US, it’s security measures, including the invasion of Iraq.
I remember reading somewhere that about a third of all food spoils. In poor countries, that spoilage primarily happens during production and transport. In rich countries, that spoilage primarily happens after the consumer buys the food. Same rate of loss, completely different causes. This reminds me of that.
Insurgent Groups Exhibit Learning Curve
Interesting research:
After analyzing reams of publicly available data on casualties from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and decades of terrorist attacks, the scientists conclude that “insurgents pretty much seemed to be following a progress curve—or a learning curve—that’s very common in the manufacturing literature,” says physicist Neil Johnson of the University of Miami in Florida and lead author of the study.
Paper here.
The U.S. Seems to Have a Secret Stealth Helicopter
That’s what the U.S. destroyed after a malfunction in Pakistan during the bin Laden assassination. (For helicopters, “stealth” is less concerned with radar signatures and more concerned with acoustical quiet.)
There was some talk about Pakistan sending it to China, but they’re returning it to the U.S. I presume that the Chinese got everything they needed quickly.
NSA Intercepts Used to Convict Liquid Bombers
Three of the UK liquid bombers were convicted Monday. NSA-intercepted e-mail was introduced as evidence in the trial:
The e-mails, several of which have been reprinted by the BBC and other publications, contained coded messages, according to prosecutors. They were intercepted by the NSA in 2006 but were not included in evidence introduced in a first trial against the three last year.
That trial resulted in the men being convicted of conspiracy to commit murder; but a jury was not convinced that they had planned to use soft drink bottles filled with liquid explosives to blow up seven trans-Atlantic planes—the charge for which they were convicted this week in a second trial.
According to Channel 4, the NSA had previously shown the e-mails to their British counterparts, but refused to let prosecutors use the evidence in the first trial, because the agency didn’t want to tip off an alleged accomplice in Pakistan named Rashid Rauf that his e-mail was being monitored. U.S. intelligence agents said Rauf was al Qaeda’s director of European operations at the time and that the bomb plot was being directed by Rauf and others in Pakistan.
The NSA later changed its mind and allowed the evidence to be introduced in the second trial, which was crucial to getting the jury conviction. Channel 4 suggests the NSA’s change of mind occurred after Rauf, a Briton born of Pakistani parents, was reportedly killed last year by a U.S. drone missile that struck a house where he was staying in northern Pakistan.
Although British prosecutors were eager to use the e-mails in their second trial against the three plotters, British courts prohibit the use of evidence obtained through interception. So last January, a U.S. court issued warrants directly to Yahoo to hand over the same correspondence.
It’s unclear if the NSA intercepted the messages as they passed through internet nodes based in the U.S. or intercepted them overseas.
EDITED TO ADD (9/9): Just to be sure, this has nothing to do with any illegal warrantless wiretapping the NSA has done over the years; the wiretap used to intercept these e-mails was obtained with a FISA warrant.
The Terrorism Arrests that Weren't
Remember those terrorism arrests that the UK government conducted, after a secret document was accidentally photographed? No one was charged:
The Crown Prosecution Service said there was insufficient evidence to press charges or hold them any longer.
The Muslim Council of Britain said the government behaved “very dishonourably” over the treatment of the men should admit it had made a mistake.
Of the 12 men arrested in the raids, 11 were Pakistani nationals, 10 held student visas and one was from Britain.
Al Qaeda Threat Overrated
Seems obvious to me:
“I reject the notion that Al Qaeda is waiting for ‘the big one’ or holding back an attack,” Sheehan writes. “A terrorist cell capable of attacking doesn’t sit and wait for some more opportune moment. It’s not their style, nor is it in the best interest of their operational security. Delaying an attack gives law enforcement more time to detect a plot or penetrate the organization.”
Terrorism is not about standing armies, mass movements, riots in the streets or even palace coups. It’s about tiny groups that want to make a big bang. So you keep tracking cells and potential cells, and when you find them you destroy them. After Spanish police cornered leading members of the group that attacked trains in Madrid in 2004, they blew themselves up. The threat in Spain declined dramatically.
Indonesia is another case Sheehan and I talked about. Several high-profile associates of bin Laden were nailed there in the two years after 9/11, then sent off to secret CIA prisons for interrogation. The suspects are now at Guantánamo. But suicide bombings continued until police using forensic evidence—pieces of car bombs and pieces of the suicide bombers—tracked down Dr. Azahari bin Husin, “the Demolition Man,” and the little group around him. In a November 2005 shootout the cops killed Dr. Azahari and crushed his cell. After that such attacks in Indonesia stopped.
The drive to obliterate the remaining hives of Al Qaeda training activity along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier and those that developed in some corners of Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 needs to continue, says Sheehan. It’s especially important to keep wanna-be jihadists in the West from joining with more experienced fighters who can give them hands-on weapons and explosives training. When left to their own devices, as it were, most homegrown terrorists can’t cut it. For example, on July 7, 2005, four bombers blew themselves up on public transport in London, killing 56 people. Two of those bombers had trained in Pakistan. Another cell tried to do the same thing two weeks later, but its members had less foreign training, or none. All the bombs were duds.
[…]
Sir David Omand, who used to head Britain’s version of the National Security Agency and oversaw its entire intelligence establishment from the Cabinet Office earlier this decade, described terrorism as “one corner” of the global security threat posed by weapons proliferation and political instability. That in turn is only one of three major dangers facing the world over the next few years. The others are the deteriorating environment and a meltdown of the global economy. Putting terrorism in perspective, said Sir David, “leads naturally to a risk management approach, which is very different from what we’ve heard from Washington these last few years, which is to ‘eliminate the threat’.”
Yet when I asked the panelists at the forum if Al Qaeda has been overrated, suggesting as Sheehan does that most of its recruits are bunglers, all shook their heads. Nobody wants to say such a thing on the record, in case there’s another attack tomorrow and their remarks get quoted back to them.
That’s part of what makes Sheehan so refreshing. He knows there’s a big risk that he’ll be misinterpreted; he’ll be called soft on terror by ass-covering bureaucrats, breathless reporters and fear-peddling politicians. And yet he charges ahead. He expects another attack sometime, somewhere. He hopes it won’t be made to seem more apocalyptic than it is. “Don’t overhype it, because that’s what Al Qaeda wants you to do. Terrorism is about psychology.” In the meantime, said Sheehan, finishing his fruit juice, “the relentless 24/7 job for people like me is to find and crush those guys.”
I’ve ordered Sheehan’s book, Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves.
Fourth Undersea Cable Failure in Middle East
The first two affected India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The third one is between the UAE and Oman. The fourth one connected Qatar and the UAE. This one may not have been cut, but taken offline due to power issues.
The first three have been blamed on ships’ anchors, but there is some dispute about that. And that’s two in the Mediterranean and two in the Persian Gulf.
There have been no official reports of malice to me, but it’s an awfully big coincidence. The fact that Iran has lost Internet connectivity only makes this weirder.
EDITED TO ADD (2/5): The International Herald Tribune has more. And a comment below questions whether Iran being offline has anything to do with this.
EDITED TO ADD (2/5): A fifth cut? What the hell is going on out there?
EDITED TO ADD (2/5): More commentary from Steve Bellovin.
EDITED TO ADD (2/5): Just to be clear: Iran is not offline. That was an untrue rumor; it was never true.
More on the German Terrorist Plot
This article is a detailed writeup of the actual investigation. While it seems that intercepted emails were instrumental at several points during the investigation, the article doesn’t explain whether the intercepts were the result of some of the wholesale eavesdropping programs or specifically obtained for this case.
The US intelligence agencies, the NSA and CIA, provided the most important information: copies of messages between German Islamists and their contacts in Pakistan. Three people in Germany were apparently the ones maintaining contact. The first was a man with the pseudonym “Muaz,” who investigators suspected was Islamist Attila S., 22. The second was a man named “Zafer,” from the town of Neunkirchen, who they believed was Zafer S., an old friend of Daniel S., one of the three men arrested last week. According to his father, Hizir S., Zafer is currently attending a language course in Istanbul. The third name that kept reappearing in the emails the NSA intercepted was “Abdul Malik,” a.k.a. Fritz Gelowicz, who prosecutors believe was the ringleader of the German cell, a man Deputy Secretary Hanning calls “cold-blooded and full of hate.”
[…]
While at the Pakistani camp in the spring of 2006, Adem Y. and Gelowicz probably discussed ways to secretly deliver messages from Pakistan to Germany. They used a Yahoo mailbox, but instead of sending messages directly, they would store them in a draft folder through which their fellow Islamists could then access the messages. But it turned out that the method they hit upon had long been known as an al-Qaida ploy. The CIA, NSA and BKA had no trouble monitoring the group’s communications. Two men who went by the aliases “Sule” or “Suley” and “Jaf” kept up the contact from the IJU side.
This is also interesting, given the many discussions on this blog and elsewhere about stopping people watching and photographing potential terrorist targets:
Early in the evening of Dec. 31, 2006, a car containing several passengers drove silently past the Hutier Barracks in Lamboy, a section of the western German city of Hanau. Hanau is known as the home of a major US military base, where thousands of US soldiers live and routinely look forward to celebrating New Year’s Eve in their home away from home. The BfV’s observation team later noted that the car drove back and forth in front of the barracks several times. When German agents finally stopped the car, they discovered that the passengers were Fritz Gelowicz, Attila S. from the southern city of Ulm, Ayhan T. from Langen near Frankfurt and Dana B., a German of Iranian descent from Frankfurt who, when asked what he and the others were doing there, claimed that they had just wanted to see “how the Americans celebrate New Year’s Eve.”
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.