WASHINGTON\u2014US intelligence officers combing through computers and storage devices found at Osama bin Laden\u2019s compound will likely uncover a \u201cgold mine\u201d of information exposing terror plots, the whereabouts of other al-Qaida figures and funding sources, former officials said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The trove of material hauled away after Bin Laden was killed in a US raid on Monday\u2014about five computers, 10 hard drives and 100 storage devices\u2014represents a dramatic intelligence breakthrough for the United States, ex-officials and security experts said.
\n\u201cI\u2019ll be very surprised if this isn\u2019t a gold mine for us,\u201d said John McLaughlin, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deputy director.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019re probably going to find reports of potential plotting. We\u2019ll probably find something about funding. We may learn something about whatever relationship he did or didn\u2019t have with Pakistan. We\u2019ll learn about key aides,\u201d he told CNN.<\/p>\n
US officials said a task force of experts from the CIA and other intelligence agencies had begun scouring the material, in a task that would last months and possibly years.<\/p>\n
The initial search will focus on \u201cdetecting ongoing threats\u201d and information pointing to \u201cother high-value targets within al-Qaida,\u201d Michael Leiter, head of the National Counter-terrorism Center, told National Public Radio.<\/p>\n
The government would \u201cprobably\u201d be adding names to its terrorist watch list as a result of the information gleaned from Bin Laden\u2019s computer files, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate hearing on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Trove of tiny details<\/strong><\/p>\n Cyberspecialists will first dismantle the hardware, taking care for possible booby traps or triggers that would erase files, and then extract and copy all the stored data, analysts said.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ll try to wring every drop out of this stuff. There\u2019s a first layer of data they might be to get at quickly, and then there\u2019s additional layers that more technical analysis would provide,\u201d said James Lewis, a former State Department official who worked on security and technology.<\/p>\n \u201cIt usually takes a long time to go through these things,\u201d said Lewis, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.<\/p>\n The painstaking search is unlikely to unearth large batches of explicit information on al-Qaida, but instead \u201chundreds of thousands of tiny details\u201d that will then be fit into a larger mosaic of intelligence, said David Lindahl, a research scientist at the Swedish Defense Research Agency in Stockholm.<\/p>\n \u201cIf they can get even one bank account, then they can start to unravel many, many things,\u201d Lindahl said.<\/p>\n No Internet or telephone lines<\/strong><\/p>\n Apart from text and numbers in computer files, a digital forensic analysis might also provide other insights such as who was using the machine and when, according to Lewis.<\/p>\n \u201cThere might be not only the data itself, but things that you\u2019d want to know that are associated with the data,\u201d Lewis said. \u201cWhen was it written? Was it written on the same machine? Is there something that indicates it came from someone else?\u201d<\/p>\n As a wanted fugitive keenly aware of a global manhunt, Bin Laden would have almost certainly used encryption to protect at least some of his computer files, Lewis and other experts said.<\/p>\n The al-Qaida chief\u2019s large compound had no telephone or Internet connection, a possible explanation for the large number of DVDs and thumb drives at the house.<\/p>\n US spy agencies believe that soon after the 9\/11 attacks, Bin Laden sought to avoid American surveillance by relying on CD ROMs delivered by courier instead of logging on to computer networks, Lewis said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WASHINGTON\u2014US intelligence officers combing through computers and storage devices found at Osama bin Laden\u2019s compound will likely uncover a \u201cgold mine\u201d of information exposing terror plots, the whereabouts of other al-Qaida figures and funding sources, former officials said on Wednesday. The trove of material hauled away after Bin Laden was killed in a US raid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,37],"tags":[492],"byline":[],"source":[206065,206078],"column":[],"editor":[],"videographer":[],"position":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n