CIA Releases 321GB of Bin Laden's Digital Library (arstechnica.com) 125
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, the Central Intelligence Agency posted a cache of files obtained from Osama Bin Laden's personal computer and other devices recovered from his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan by Navy SEALs during the raid in which he was killed on May 2, 2011. The 470,000 files, 321 gigabytes in all, include documents, images, videos, and audio recordings, including Al Qaeda propaganda and planning documents, home videos of Bin Laden's son Hazma, and "drafts" of propaganda videos. There is also a lot of digital junk among the files.
The CIA site presents a raft of warnings about the content of the downloads: "The material in this file collection may contain content that is offensive and/or emotionally disturbing. This material may not be suitable for all ages. Please view it with discretion. Prior to accessing this file collection, please understand that this material was seized from a terrorist organization. While the files underwent interagency review, there is no absolute guarantee that all malware has been removed."
The CIA site presents a raft of warnings about the content of the downloads: "The material in this file collection may contain content that is offensive and/or emotionally disturbing. This material may not be suitable for all ages. Please view it with discretion. Prior to accessing this file collection, please understand that this material was seized from a terrorist organization. While the files underwent interagency review, there is no absolute guarantee that all malware has been removed."
So, like retweeting propaganda? (Score:2)
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Some dumb assholes convinced them that the best way to fight terrorism is with more terrorism.
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The truth is the truth. The truth doesn't care that you don't like it and it won't just disappear because you close your eyes and plug your ears like a little child.
Sounds to me like somebody watched too many Hollywood movies and is parroting their pathetic speeches.
YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!
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It all comes down to The Rule of Goats: even if you say you're only fucking goats ironically, you're still a goatfucker.
https://twitter.com/popehat/st... [twitter.com]
https://www.popehat.com/2017/0... [popehat.com]
I'm not going to watch binny boy's pr0n stash, I don't care if the CIA says it is the good stuff. For the same reason I wouldn't click on an image link from slashdot. I don't care if it is an ironic goat.
Bit confusing (Score:1)
So are those files just binaries or libraries?
PS:
Seems like the right amount for Android project.
How did some monkey in the desert.... (Score:1)
...accumulate more data than me. Geez, he needed to get out of his mom's basement, what a loser.
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...accumulate more data than me.
Its the donkey porn.
Does this include... (Score:5, Funny)
... his porn stash?
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Nope:
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Nope:
I am incensed! I believe that it is important to posterity to be able to comment authoritatively about exactly what kind of pornography Osama bin Laden was into!
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Seriously, though. His followers and other True Believers in religion who liked him need to know his sordid details.
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You can view it here:
https://youtu.be/w57JLmY5dmw?t... [youtu.be]
Osama didn't have the hardcore stuff though, because he found the parts where they show their whole face to be too distasteful.
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Probably young boys. Boys are for fucking and girls are for making babies. Ask people who have spent time in Afghanistan about young boy Thursdays. On Friday they pray the sins away.
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Ask people who have spent time in Afghanistan about young boy Thursdays.
Yes, especially about your tax dollars at work [houstonpress.com].
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Considering copyright laws, I'm more interested in how they determined that the materials they *did* release were not subject to copyright protection.
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Re: Slashdotted already? (Score:1)
Don't worry, they have your IP address which is all they were after.
Article content (Score:5, Informative)
In an effort to further enhance public understanding of al-Qa'ida, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on 1 November 2017 released additional materials recovered in the 2 May 2011 raid on Usama Bin Ladin's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
With the release of these materials, the information remaining in the collection that has not been released publicly includes materials that are protected by copyright; sensitive such that their release would directly damage efforts to keep the nation secure; pornography; malware; and blank, corrupted, and duplicate files. The entire collection has been available to the US Intelligence Community and Department of Defense organizations for years.
The Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) previously released documents from the collection on 20 May 2015, 1 March 2016, and 19 January 2017 after an interagency review spearheaded by the CIA. The releases align with ODNI initiatives for increased transparency - consistent with national security prerogatives - and the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act, which required the ODNI to conduct a review of the documents for release.
CIA's 1 November 2017 release includes additional al-Qa'ida letters, videos, audio files, and communications, as well as routine family correspondence. As a result, it builds on the ODNI releases that provided material relevant to understanding the plans and workings of terrorist organizations. The material is posted in the original Arabic and in as close to the original form as possible, modified only so the files cannot be edited.
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Some of the content could land you in trouble in some parts of the world.
The terrorism stuff could be illegal to view in the UK.
The home videos could violate the subjects' right to privacy if (re) published in the EU.
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It's a good thing for them the United States government is not part of the UK or EU.
That being said, I don't think the subjects in home videos owned by bin Laden will ever want to take a case to court. It doesn't seem to be the style of the company he kept.
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I'm in the UK, and when I click on the link in the summary I get bounced to the CIA.gov homepage.
there is no absolute guarantee . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
. . .there is no absolute guarantee that all malware has been removed.
Sure. But I wouldn't be surprised if malware were added.
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Don't use your own IP to download it either. Better safe than sorry.
Strange vibe (Score:1)
Is this common? I wasn't aware this kind of thing was done. I don't have any problem with it, but it just seems like a weird thing to do.
Re:Strange vibe (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have any problem with it, but it just seems like a weird thing to do.
Toss out a big, juicy net that fish can just not resist.
Have "Osama bin Laden, Director's Cut" phone home when downloaded and installed.
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The information released does not contain any new revelations or anything else the intelligence community needs. As with any information dump the question is not what information was released but what information was NOT released. One of the things that has always bothered me about the release of the Snowden information is that the data published has always seemed engineered to promote a particular line of thinking. Even the information released concerning NSA programs were vague and contained no real subst
Résumé (Score:1)
"Allah my lord, what will my legacy be for the world?"
"Your harddisk has replaced kittens on encyclopedia dramatica."
Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Have they ever done this before? Why would they do this? Who needs to see this anyway? The only reason I can think of is they planted their own malware and will be tracking everyone and anyone who even so much as accesses that website.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
To track the ip of everyone who looks.
An easy way to collect the locations of interested bloggers, the media, press, journalists, independent journalists, students, historians.
Recall
"NSA likely targets anybody who's 'Tor-curious'"
https://www.cnet.com/g00/news/... [cnet.com]
".. selection rules that potentially add to an NSA watch list anybody who has not only used, but visited online privacy-protection tools
Re "malware". The security services get the ip, the actual ip behind most of the consumer grade VPN products used by people looking the site.
Cooking gov, mil grade malware into the files is just going to push out quality gov malware onto a lot of people who might have very good anti virus.
Better to sort the ip lists of people who looked and then push malware down to the interesting people. Less for the better quality AV products to find globally.
Push too much malware out and it gets detected. The results also have to be understood by gov/mil/contractors in real time.
Malware tends to be held back for interesting people. Everyone gets tracked. 4 hops of their connections, friends get reviewed.
Lots of friends in the elite north east of the USA? Interesting they looked, but not that interesting.
Lots of friends and connections globally? Human review. Appropriate malware considered for the system found, AV the person updated for, type of person.
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"With the release of these materials, the information remaining in the collection that has not been released publicly includes materials that are protected by copyright; sensitive such that their release would directly damage efforts to keep the nation secure; pornography; malware; and blank, corrupted, and duplicate files. The entire collection has been available to the US Intelligence Community and Department of Defense organizations for years."
In other words, the intelligence community is hording Bin Lad
Technique to collect more data? (Score:1)
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I'm just curious if they're also monetizing the traffic with advertisements. Not curious enough to actually look, mind you.
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How would that be useful?
If the CIA wants a list of arbitrary addresses (but why?!), they could either just randomly generate them, or query IANA for what ranges are allocated to ISPs. Those approaches would be faster and cheaper, and the second option would be more complete.
Now, if a private party (e.g. Google or Facebook) were releasing t
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Minus what linked him to the CIA? (Score:1)
So will the the old files on how he was trained by and working for the CIA be included?
What about those regarding how he was merely Hamid Gul's PR guy?
(Hamid Gul ex-head of the Pakistani military intelligence, who oversaw the construction of the Pakistani nukes, and was so crazy, that the Al Qaeda detained him, because he wanted to fly planed with nuclear warheads over to the US. And he’s the guy, who can be seen in many photos, cheerfully sitting next to CIA officers wearing a turban, drinking tea li
As in "redacted" ... (Score:3)
There is also a lot of digital junk among the files.
Anyone want to guess (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Anyone want to guess (Score:4, Informative)
what nasty thing they're doing that this is supposed to distract us from? I will never believe that our CIA does anything out of the goodness of their heart. If I saw one of them reach down to pet a puppy I'd have it checked by a bomb squad.
For the record...
The release came in accordance with a 2014 appropriations bill for intelligence activity that required the Director of National Intelligence to review documents obtained from the raid, and make the files it declassified from the review available to the public.
Wednesday's document dump is the latest addition to the public collection, dubbed "bin Laden's bookshelf" by the DNI. The collection includes three previous releases since May 2015.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/01/... [cnn.com]
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They're already trying to create the narrative that Iran is in league with Bin Laden and needs to be attacked by the United States.
Trump has signed on to the Project for a New American Century.
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Just put yourself in the shoes of the CIA. I don't know whether they took any data at all from Bin Laden but the released files are sure to be chock full of doctored and fake documents incriminating our opponents Iran/Russia/Syria/North Korea/Venezuela and others.
I just checked with someone who's faster than me on these things and indeed http://www.moonofalabama.org/2... [moonofalabama.org]
there's a document incriminating Iran, linking it to Al Qaeda. There will be more.
Click bait ... (Score:2)
... to get your beacon and match it up to their database.
What's the reasoning? (Score:2)
Is this a standard practice (that's only getting noted because OBL)? Is it so widely distributed internally and to other agencies that they figure it will leak out regardless, so they might as well do it on their terms? Or do they think this has legitimate value for researchers and counter-terrorism researchers?
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If he was still alive don't you think him making a statement would be the ultimate insult?
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I think you should read Seymour Hersh on this. He's the most reliable source I know on the subject (which doesn't guarantee him being right on everything) He says Bin Laden was a defenseless man in a wheelchair who was mostly shot to pieces.
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Am I the only one that believes the whole Bin Laden assassination was faked?
Not just the assassination.
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Probably not. There are people who think Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison are still alive too. And Andy Kaufman! And I shit you not: many many years ago, I think I saw a tabloid headline claiming that even JFK was still alive (but brain-damaged, of course).
(Adolph Hitler was a good one too, but even if he had been alive after 1945, he'd have still died of old age by now.)
Why you do believe he's still alive? ("He" being bin Laden, bu
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"Am I the only one that believes the whole Bin Laden assassination was faked?" Yes.
an effort to further enhance public understanding (Score:2)
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I'll quote from my completely-made-up super-secret unredacted investigation document:
The Dallas witness said that an ambitious group of Soviet university students had discussed an assassination and met every Thursday in "Kampainstart Tavern", a bar in Moscow. Through CIA Agent Skip Towne, an operation was begun in Moscow (see referenced document #3.14) utilizing the American-sympathetic professor Dr. Doktor, resulting in the cooperation of Igor Tratorov, a student known to frequent the bar in question. The most potent truth serum available to Dr. Doktor (which was slightly less potent than the vodka available) was a standard dose of truthinol. Under the serum's (and vodka's) influence, Tratorov revealed that the discussion was actually a plan to assassinate the senior chief janitor at the Kremlin. Tratorov was presented the option to defect to the United States, but chose to remain in the USSR to complete his studies, while continuing to assist the CIA as an operative under Agent Towne.
This would add no useful information to the story of Kennedy's assassination, but it would endanger the lives of everyone named, as well as trigger a few dozen investigations into colleagues, friends, and family, some of which might still be assisting the United States through old connections. The named Agent Towne might no longer be playing the spy game, but if he started introducing another American in Moscow before leavi
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CIA Agent Skip Towne
I can hardly believe that's a real name!
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The CIA (Score:1)
Reading between the lines (Score:2)
"there is no absolute guarantee that all malware has been removed"
You might have slipped in a few pieces of spyware of your own, you mean.
321GB eh? (Score:1)
That's a lot of material. Must be 4K video. Did Tolstoy even write that much?
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2001? The summary clearly says it was from 2011. So, basically less than a single hard drive.
BTW, we had 40~80GB hard drives on 2001 so it would have been somewhere around a dozen rather than 30.
Oh sure (Score:5, Insightful)
When the CIA releases Al Qaeda propaganda it's perfectly fine.
If I were to even say something nice about the bastards then I'd be labelled a terrorist and find myself in a 0-star suite in Cuba wearing an orange jumpsuit. I thought that the CIA was supposed to be fighting the CIA, not becoming their web provider.
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I thought that the CIA was supposed to be fighting the CIA
Eh?
do not touch (Score:5, Insightful)
Who here would want to have their computer analyzed at some later date for an unrelated charge and have what amounts to recruiting material for a terrorist organization found on their laptop? Even if you could explain it away, that might well be only after spending heaploads in lawyer fees.
Sounds like one should not touch any of this release. Bad ju-ju.
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This is funny as hell. (Score:1)
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Re:Obama wouldn't release cuz he worked with Iran (Score:5, Insightful)
Kinda crazy to sign off on allowing Iran to get nukes and pay them a few hundred billion dollars when the Iranian regime is working closely with al Qaeda, isn't it?
Those lies never get old, do they? As part of the deal, Iran stopped working on their nuclear program, and allowed extensive verification of this. How can you possibly spin this into 'allowing Iran to get nukes'? The money was not a payment, it was Iranian money that was frozen as part of the sanctions against Iran. Big difference.
And to trot out an old quote: You don't make peace with your friends. You make peace with your enemies.
Re:Obama wouldn't release cuz he worked with Iran (Score:4, Insightful)
Kinda crazy to sign off on allowing Iran to get nukes and pay them a few hundred billion dollars when the Iranian regime is working closely with al Qaeda, isn't it?
Except he didn't "sign off on allowing Iran to get nukes", nor did he pay them hundreds of billions of dollars. The Iran deal bars Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And the "payments" you refer to were millions, not billions, and were Iran's money to begin with, we had frozen those assets in 1979 and had never returned it, until ordered by international courts to do so, which coincidentally was about the same time as the nuclear deal.