A primer on communications
The NY Sun describes communications in the al Qaeda network, a subject that has generated controversy in recent days::
Al Qaeda set up its Internet communications in three tiers. The smallest circle includes senior leaders such as the head of the group’s information committee, Abu Abdel Rahman al Magrebi, a son-in-law of Al Qaeda no. 2, Ayman al Zawahari. Mr. Gunaratna estimated that this circle consisted of no more than 20 people, and was nearly impossible to penetrate — although, he said, America, Britain, and Pakistan had a successful operation that penetrated Al Qaeda’s most secretive Web communications for a period in 2004.
Then, after one of the founders of Al Qaeda’s Internet system, Mohammed Naeem Nur Khan, had been arrested in secret by Pakistani intelligence in July 2004, allied intelligence services were able to monitor the communications of this leadership group for about five weeks though Mr. Khan’s messages to the top tier committee. The operation was blown after leaks to the Washington Post and New York Times, Mr. Gunaratna said, a breach he considers comparable to the leaking of Mr. bin Laden’s speech.
The next tier of Al Qaeda’s Internet communications consists of the password-protected sites, also known as Obelisk, and is used mainly by middle and lower-level Qaeda operatives. “We refer to these as the password-protected sites,” Mr. Gunaratna said. “They are time-bound, they will work on this front only for certain people, they change Web sites constantly. You have to be plugged in, it’s like a game
You may recall in reports about the 2004 operation referred to above, some US military men were implicated in clandestine communications of the jihadist variety.