Return-Path: <sentto-279987-3123-1003458363-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 [204.181.12.215] by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.7.4) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Thu, 18 Oct 2001 19:27:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 13289 invoked by uid 510); 19 Oct 2001 02:25:41 -0000 Received: from n32.groups.yahoo.com (216.115.96.82) by 204.181.12.215 with SMTP; 19 Oct 2001 02:25:41 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-3123-1003458363-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com Received: from [10.1.4.55] by n32.groups.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 19 Oct 2001 02:26:03 -0000 X-Sender: fc@red.all.net X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_0_1); 19 Oct 2001 02:26:02 -0000 Received: (qmail 69367 invoked from network); 19 Oct 2001 02:26:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 19 Oct 2001 02:26:02 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO red.all.net) (65.0.156.78) by mta2 with SMTP; 19 Oct 2001 02:26:02 -0000 Received: (from fc@localhost) by red.all.net (8.11.2/8.11.2) id f9J1e9A06509 for iwar@onelist.com; Thu, 18 Oct 2001 18:40:09 -0700 Message-Id: <200110190140.f9J1e9A06509@red.all.net> To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List) Organization: I'm not allowed to say X-Mailer: don't even ask X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> X-Yahoo-Profile: fcallnet Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 18:40:09 -0700 (PDT) Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Subject: [iwar] [fc:The.science.of.signals.intelligence] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 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. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Pinpoint the right security solution for your company- Learn how to add 128- bit encryption and to authenticate your web site with VeriSign's FREE guide! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yQix2C/33_CAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ------------------ http://all.net/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 20:59:55 PST