Bin Laden's Sneakernet Email System 240
Hugh Pickens writes "Osama bin Laden was a prolific writer who put together a painstaking email system that thwarted the US government's best eavesdroppers despite having no Internet access in his hideout. Holed up in his walled compound in northeast Pakistan with no phone or Internet capabilities, bin Laden would type a message on his computer, save it using a thumb-sized flash drive that he passed to a trusted courier, who would head for a distant Internet cafe. At that location, the courier would plug the drive into a computer, copy bin Laden's message into an email and send it. Intelligence officials are wading through thousands of the email exchanges after around 100 flash drives were seized from the compound by US Navy Seals."
Re:Sneakernet? (Score:5, Informative)
The term sneakernet harkens back to the early days of computing where the only way to get information was to put it on a disk and walk it over to another computer and load it there. Thus a network using your sneakers (your shoes) as the transportation method. So this would be partially true for this instance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
Re:The Onion Router (Score:2, Informative)
that's part of why tor was built: to enable communication of persecuted minorities. when we built tor we were thinking post-tienanmen democracy advocates in china. our noble intentions in building tor don't keep the technology from being useful to other persecuted minorities that we don't like.
...
Or it was designed for military communications between ships by hopping on other ships signals not under the control of the US Navy without needing direct secure links between US Navy ships.
to enable communication of persecuted minorities
Quit making shit up. You just totally made up a reason for creating Tor that has nothing to do with the actual reason it was created.