September 27, 2001
According to this Guardian article

According to this Guardian article by Duncan Cambell (How the plotters slipped US net): "FBI assistant director Ron Dick, head of the US National Infrastructure Protection Centre, told reporters that the hijackers had used the net, and 'used it well'." (Sure, I get it....The same way that a gang of bank robbers "uses the roads, and uses them well" when they drive off in a getaway car...)

More from the story:

NSA has been attempting to keep up with the internet by building huge online storage systems to hold and sift email. The first such system, designed in 1996 and delivered last year, is known as Sombrero VI. It holds a petabyte of information. A petabyte is a million gigabytes, and is roughly equivalent to eight times the information in the Library of Congress. NSA is now implementing a Petaplex system, at least 20 times larger. It is designed to hold internet records for up to 90 days.
Dr Gladman and other experts believe that, unless primed by intelligence from traditional agents, these massive spy libraries are doomed to fail. The problem with NSA's purely technological approach is that it cannot know what it is looking for. While computers can search for patterns, the problem of correlating different pieces of information rises exponentially as ever more communications are intercepted. In short, NSA's mighty technology apparatus can easily be rendered blind, as happened here, if it has nothing to start from.
The new legal plans may therefore do more harm than good. According to Cambridge computer security specialist Dr Ian Miller, bringing back escrow "will damage our security in other ways, and divert an enormous amount of effort that would far better be spent elsewhere. It won't inconvenience competent terrorists in the least.
PGP inventor Phil Zimmermann thinks the penalty of politicians misunderstanding technology will be even more costly. "If we install blanket surveillance systems, it will mean the terrorists have won. The terrorists will have cost us our freedom."
Posted by Lisa at September 27, 2001 02:12 AM | TrackBack
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