Educated and computer-savvy, the masterminds who toppled the World Trade Center and blasted the Pentagon have opened a new front in the war between terrorists and international law enforcement agencies.
As reported by USA Today, the average American’s perception that terrorists are angry but uneducated has apparently been debunked by the fact that several of the alleged WTC attackers were “college-educated and from well-off or prominent families,” and half of them had pilots' licenses.
The paper cites FBI agents as saying that the alleged hijackers “assimilated into the Western culture they apparently hated so much: Several of the hijackers lived in the US for many years, learned Americans' ways and how to use that knowledge in carrying out their missions.”
Indeed, terrorists seem to have used the pride of America’s information technology (IT) innovations, the Internet, to pass information back and forth.
The hijackers used public web terminals and unencrypted e-mail messages to keep in touch, according to FBI sources cited by the BBC.online.
Earlier reports that terrorists had been using pornographic pictures to send concealed information have apparently been debunked by an exhaustive University of Michigan study, according to the BBC’s online technology correspondent, but the fact remains that IT seems to have facilitated the attacks.
But IT also allegedly factored into the attacks in an even more sophisticated and striking way: by threatening the US president himself.
According to WorldNetDaily.com, the US Secret Service received a message,
"Air Force One is next," at 9:00am on September 11, after the two hijacked planes struck the twin towers of the WTC.
Three minutes later, according to the report, Secret Service agents hauled Vice President Dick Cheney into a White House emergency operations center, a bunker built to withstand a nuclear blast.
The online news service reported that the message threatening Air Force One “was transmitted in that day's top-secret White House code words,” leading the Secret Service to conclude that the terrorists had obtained the White House code and a whole set of top-secret signals.
This, in turn, made it possible for a hostile force to “pinpoint the exact position of Air Force One, its destination and its classified procedures,” said the report.
In fact, according to WorldNetDaily, the hijackers were intercepting and deciphering the presidential plane's incoming and outgoing transmissions.
Worse still, the terrorists had also obtained the code groups of the National Security Agency and were able to penetrate the NSA's state-of-the-art electronic surveillance systems, according to the report.
US investigators are now scouring the virtual and material worlds for evidence that will point to a mole, or some other source of information, from which the terrorists could have obtained such top-secret codes.
In the wake of these newly apparent vulnerabilities to terrorism, the United States government and military is likely to boost spending on e-intelligence, according to the New Zealand-based online Courier Mail, and “may tighten up on offshore release of encryption systems. E-surveillance in all forms is likely to rise.”
But despite the terrorists’ new hi-tech skills, the BBC report warned against “relying on technology to help spot terrorists before they attack.”
Many groups still use messages passed by trusted messengers and word of mouth rather than electronic networks, said the BBC – a fact that might argue for not overreacting to the technological basis for the attacks.
Experts cited in the report say that low-tech methods used in last week’s attacks on New York and Washington – including box cutters - show it was “basic failures in intelligence work rather than too little technology that gave the hijackers their opportunity.”
After the September 11 tragedy, this much looks likely: the new generation of terrorists have melded hi tech and low tech into a potent strategy, and the law enforcement agencies established to track them down must keep an eye peeled in both directions – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
