Word: bins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fleet of U.S. intelligence gathering satellites is an awesome apparatus that gives men and women sitting in Washington an ability to read the time on Osama bin Laden's wristwatch and listen in on his every cell phone conversation. That is, of course, if they know where he is. (And the Saudi terrorist-financier long ago figured out that his cell phone wasn't secure.) The point is that the most sophisticated intelligence technology is useless unless some of the simplest information is available...
...General Mike Hayden, who heads up the National Security Agency that conducts all satellite intelligence gathering, warned last February that Bin Laden's communication network was more sophisticated than the ability of the U.S. to keep track of it. The problem, Hayden said, was globalization. U.S. capability was built to listen in on the Soviets, a lumbering nation-state that had to rely on its own communication technology. Bin Laden, on the other hand, is able to take advantage of the best the global communications industry can offer. "Cell phones, encryption, fiber optic communications, digital communication. Those are all available...
...that may not help. It is not just getting intelligence, but what you do with the intelligence you get. Evidence introduced in the East Africa embassy bombing trials suggested the NSA had monitored some of the sat-phone communications between Bin Laden and the perpetrators ahead of the attack, but that didn't give them enough information to prevent the deadly bombing...
...prove excruciatingly difficult for U.S. operatives to directly penetrate Bin Laden's networks. His cells are often formed on the basis of family or kinship ties, and may even require a new recruit to kill in order to prove himself. The operatives, who would have to blend in ethnically, would have to forego their American lives for many years, years spent in the exceedingly harsh conditions of Bin Laden's mountain camps...
...intelligence agencies closer to the action. "We don't do manhunts well," says CIA veteran Robert D. Steele, author of "On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World." "We had to invade Panama to get Noriega. It took us years get Pablo Escobar. And we won't get Bin Laden without help of Saudi and Pakistani intelligence...