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IP: Hidden Files - New York Times
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 08:24:17 -0500
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2002 23:41:35 -0800 To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu> From: Einar Stefferud <stef () nma com> Subject: Hidden Files - New York Times New York Times - January 18, 2002 EDITORIAL Hidden Files In its war against the West, Al Qaeda's greatest success has been its ability to use the tools and behaviors of ordinary civilian life to interrupt the conduct of ordinary civilian life. Sept. 11 made that point, as did the arrest in late December of Richard Reid, who was allegedly trained by Al Qaeda and who wore explosive sneakers aboard a jetliner bound from Paris to Miami. But there is no better evidence of Al Qaeda's search for everyday targets than the discovery of two computers once used in a Qaeda office, a desktop and a laptop, that were later purchased by a Wall Street Journal reporter from a computer merchant in Kabul for $1,100. Many of us spend a good part of every working day making our way around the metaphorical architecture of our computers, opening files, using programs, sending and retrieving documents. That architecture - the map of folders and programs - becomes almost as familiar as the architecture of the buildings we work and live in. But The Wall Street Journal reports that within the Qaeda computers, alongside routine file structures and ubiquitous tools like Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Word, lurked a very different map, an itinerary of travels by a man called Abdul Ra'uff. That itinerary bears an uncanny similarity to the series of journeys Mr. Reid made in the months before his arrest. Whoever Mr. Ra'uff was, his job was to scout out the vulnerabilities, the opportunities for terrorism, in Israel, Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere. The assessments of potential targets, and the carnage they might generate, are couched in the banal, unemotive language of a business transaction. The Journal says the hard drives of these computers also contain the bureaucratic debris of Al Qaeda. There is a letter written to set up an interview with the Afghan opposition leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was murdered by the men who came to interview him. Some texts suggest that, no matter how zealous its membership was, Al Qaeda had some of the same failings that afflict many organizations - petty infighting, internal policy disputes and difficult relations with other organizations, in this case the Taliban. Throughout many of the documents runs a corporate camouflage, as if Al Qaeda were just another company and Osama Bin Laden merely a captain of general management. The contents of these computers, and of reference works like the Encyclopedia of Jihad, demonstrate that Al Qaeda is vastly more familiar with our world than we are with the world of Al Qaeda. But then our world is so much easier to know. Most espionage novels convey the chill of looking through eyes that see in everyday life both a place to hide and targets to mark. There is no camouflage like the mundane, and no surer way to wreak havoc than to disrupt the mundane patterns that anchor people's lives. Merely to know that someone has been watching, looking for ways to exploit the confidence we have in the shape of daily life, is far more chilling than any spy novel could ever be. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/18/opinion/18FRI2.html
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