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Politech is the oldest Internet resource devoted to politics and technology. Launched in 1994 by Declan McCullagh, the mailing list has chronicled the growing intersection of culture, technology, politics, and law. Since 2000, so has the Politech web site.
--- From: "Erich M" <me@quintessenz.at> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 14:33:48 +0100 Subject: Bin Laden's communications system -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Declan, Here is the gist of three stories in German linked below cu erich If Bin Ladens Voice really could be identified on intercepted radio communications as some US Media report, he most likley used used a Handset of the "High Power HF SSB System" by the Australian manufacturer Codan. These Shortwave SSB [Single Side Band modulation] radio systems [voice and data] are used by most of the UN and many NGO relief orgs [UNHCR, UNICEF, Omar, Red cross] The Codan Marketing Manager confirmed that they had to ship over one thousand additional units to resupply the losses of those organisations in Afghanistan. Taliban/Al Quaeda systematically robbed those Codan Systems and used them to hide their communications. Can you imagine how difficult it was for the US to identify a communications station as a target when it was active with a hardware id and a callsign belonging to a UN organization? In many of the cases when relief orgs were hit by US missiles a Codan station was also destroyed. Codan System typically consists of automobile transceivers, a powerful base station [up to 1 KW covering the whole shortwave spectrum] plus a number of handsets. Each base station can handle up to 400 [!] radio telephony channels, Codan also delievers radio modems Shortwave, being the dirtiest of all spectra of course does not allow reliable on- the-air voice encryption - way too much noise around. Data transmissions are very slow [1Kbit/sec is "fast"] because of high data transmission error rates. Strong encryption systems are difficult to apply - if one character ist corrupt, the whole message remains unreadable - so even embassies around the world use some kind of Baudot-like numerical Code: Information is coded in groups of five numbers. All an easy prey to ECHELON I'd say. Al Kaida did not communicate via PGP or Steganography in pornographic images - God forbid! They used stolen two way radio hardware from relief organizations with stolen callsigns. The challenge to US surveillance was to identify whether a voice speaking in Pashtu [or some other dialect] belonged to the enemy. Or not: four Afghan engineers of a UN technical aid unit were killed by a cruise missile beginning October, the building contained a Codan base station. Full text http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/11357/1.html Abridged version http://futurezone.orf.at/futurezone.orf?read=detail&id=99932 first story http://futurezone.orf.at/futurezone.orf?read=detail&id=98032 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 6.5.8 -- QDPGP 2.61c Comment: http://community.wow.net/grt/qdpgp.html iQA/AwUBPByUrCfG0CJMDx3nEQIOrwCgjQShV/LhGNK3/NglAorcYO7OwRgAoLpR AIb+EJiXUJMZn5tGJq2JytCa =Bcui -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------------- Taeglich frische IT-Nachrichten http://futurezone.orf.at ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------