NewsMax.com Wires
Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2001

The officials say bin Laden and his associates are using the Internet to conduct what some are calling ''e-jihad,'' or holy war.

Bin Laden, a dissident Saudi businessman, has been indicted for the bombing in 1998 of two U.S. embassies in East Africa and is believed to be behind the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12. Four alleged bin Laden associates went on trial Monday in New York for the embassy bombings.

''To a greater and greater degree, terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas and bin Laden's al Qaida group, are using computerized files, e-mail and encryption to support their operations,'' CIA Director George Tenet wrote last March to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The testimony, given at a closed-door hearing, was later made public.

Through weeks of interviews with U.S. law enforcement officials and experts, USA TODAY has learned details of how extremists hide maps and photographs of terrorist targets – and post instructions for terrorist activities – in sports chat rooms, on pornographic bulletin boards and other popular Web sites. The officials, who declined to name the sites, say it is extremely difficult to intercept the coded messages.

''It's something the intelligence, law enforcement and military communities are really struggling to deal with,'' says Ben Venzke, special projects director for iDEFENSE, a cyberintelligence company.

Officials and experts say the messages are scrambled using free encryption programs set up by groups that advocate privacy on the Internet.

Those same programs also can hide maps and photographs in an existing image on selected Web sites. The e-mails and images can only be decrypted using a ''private key,'' or code, selected by the recipient.

''The operational details and future targets, in many cases, are hidden in plain view on the Internet,'' Venzke says. ''Only the members of the terrorist organizations, knowing the hidden signals, are able to extract the information.''

Officials say bin Laden began using encryption five years ago but recently increased its use after U.S. officials revealed that they were tapping his satellite telephone calls in Afghanistan and tracking his activities.

''We will use whatever tools we can – e-mails, the Internet – to facilitate jihad against the [Israeli] occupiers and their supporters,'' Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of the militant Muslim group Hamas, said in a recent interview in the Gaza Strip. ''We have the best minds working with us.''

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Domestic Terrorism