[iwar] [fc:The.science.of.signals.intelligence]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-18 18:40:09
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 18:40:09 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:The.science.of.signals.intelligence]
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Weapons of the Secret War   

How the shadowy science of signals intelligence, honed in the drug wars, can 
help us fight terrorism.
    
By Paul Kaihla, November 2001 Issue
<a href="http://www.business2.com">http://www.business2.com>    
    
The target never had a clue that he was in imminent danger.  A
high-ranking member of a Kashmiri terrorist group implicated in the
World Trade Center attack, he had every reason to believe he had eluded
the manhunt.  He was lying low in a nondescript safe house on the
outskirts of Peshawar in Pakistan's Khyber Pass region.  He steered
clear of phones and kept to himself.  His sole contact with his global
ring was through wireless e-mail transmitted by a high-frequency radio
running on only eight flashlight batteries.  Using that low-powered
signal to send messages of only a few words at a time -- keeping
transmissions to short bursts -- he was impossible to trace.  Or so he
thought.  What the terrorist couldn't know was that signals intelligence
operatives had been on his trail for months.  His communications network
relied on a base station hundreds of miles away in the Afghan desert;
that device had been spotted by a robotic spy plane, a U.S.  Air Force
Predator, that was mapping radio traffic along the mountainous
Afghan-Pakistani border from an altitude of 25,000 feet.  Thereafter,
each radio message he sent brought his fate closer, the final one
pinpointed by members of the U.S.  antiterrorism unit, Delta Force, who
were sweeping his outpost with handheld direction finders.  They staked
out the house with local commandos and waited.  When their man stepped
out for some air, they made a visual confirmation and radioed the kill
order to a Pakistani sniper team. 

From a quarter-mile away, a shooter took out the target with a single
.50-caliber bullet.  In the shadowy war against the architects of the
Sept.  11 atrocity, this is how victory may look.  If you think it all
sounds too much like a Tom Clancy novel to be true, you're mistaken: The
hypothetical scenario above parallels almost exactly the real-life
demise on Dec.  2, 1993, of public enemy number one in the U.S.  war on
drugs, Pablo Escobar. 

That manhunt ended in Medellmn, of course, not Peshawar, and the
infinite justice was administered by Colombian, not Pakistani,
commandos.  Still, members of the U.S.  intelligence community and
military say the drug cartel raids of the 1990s are a model for
antiterror strategists today.  In both campaigns, U.S.  special forces
advise indigenous troops, who do the actual dirty work. 

And in both cases, American signals intelligence technology plays a
crucial role.  Broadly speaking, signals intelligence (sigint) is the
interception, exploitation, and jamming of electronic communication,
whether it's radiated through the atmosphere and sea or through fixed
lines like the telephone grid.  In its 21st-century American
application, it is a multibillion-dollar enterprise designed to
eavesdrop on the conversations and data traffic of U.S.  adversaries
anywhere in the world.  (However, the law prohibits blanket electronic
monitoring of U.S.  residents, one reason perhaps that intelligence
agencies missed the hundreds of e-mails the Sept.  11 hijackers
exchanged with each other from personal computers and public library
kiosks.)

The listening posts in this worldwide surveillance network range from
simple radio antennas wired into sophisticated receivers to P-3 Orion
spy planes operated by the U.S.  Navy and Customs Service to nuclear
submarines like the USS Jimmy Carter, which can sit on the ocean floor
for weeks at a time tapping undersea fiber-optic cables. 

The network even extends into space, where at least eight geosynchronous
spy satellites vacuum up radio and other waves emanating from earth,
beam the captured data to receivers on various continents, and then
relay them to the mecca of sigint, the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters of
the National Security Agency (NSA).  Some of the above listening points
feed data into the computers of a Cold War-inspired intelligence
cooperative called Echelon, maintained by the United States, Canada,
Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. 


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