A small private intelligence company [SITE] that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release. Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide. The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.
As a result, “al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past.” Via Power Line, the New York Sun‘s Eli Lake also covers this story today:
[T]he disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda’s internal security division that the organization’s Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. This network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda’s production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world. While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda… The founder of a Web site known as clandestineradio.com, Nick Grace, tracked the shutdown of Qaeda’s Obelisk system in real time. “It was both unprecedented and chilling from the perspective of a Web techie. The discipline and coordination to take the entire system down involving multiple Web servers, hundreds of user names and passwords, is an astounding feat, especially that it was done within minutes,” Mr. Grace said yesterday.
Bloggers are all over this story. On the surface, it’s fishy–if not a serious security breach. Liberal bloggers are running with it, claiming that the Bush administration is responsible for the leak and leaked it for political gain prior to General Petraeus’s testimony. Don Surber notes the negative implications:
While this is being portrayed as a leak that cost the American military its chance to monitor al-Qaeda, it seems to me al-Qaeda just lost its communications. And a smart fellow, upon learning his communications network was compromised, would start using it to send fake stuff to put the U.S. military on wild goose chases.
Right-wing bloggers are more circumspect. Ed at Captain’s Quarters notes that while this has certainly caused an intelligence setback,
The NSA has undoubtedly already started checking communications to track down all of the new activity, and there may be greater vulnerability for AQ during its launch. It could be that the US wanted to rattle AQ and get them to dismantle their systems, and leaked the Osama tape to both embarrass them and to get them to panic and leave a big trail. It could have been an attempt to force AQ into a mole hunt, a technique both sides used in the Cold War. Let’s not forget that the destruction of the Obelisk network will have created difficulties for AQ, too. It will have increased their reliance on human couriers for messaging. The US may have wanted to force AQ into using those in order to finalize a position on AQ leadership, or on other management assets in the terrorist organization. Forcing them to dismantle their network may have given the US an opportunity to triangulate through conventional means on Osama himself, or Ayman al-Zawahiri.
And Prairie Pundit says:
A cynic might suggest that someone in the CIA leaked it to harm the competition. It has been an agency that has a record of leaking things to harm the administration’s policies and this is the type of leak that might be consistent with the prior ones. The SITE capture of the prereleased video was a real coup that probably shook up the al Qaeda geek staff. My guess is SITE or the NSA will probably be able to out geek them pretty quickly. Again, a cynic might think this story is a cover to get the al Qaeda geeks comfortable with their new security measures so that they start sending data again.
We don’t know at this point. Hot Air is interested in another aspect of this story: Why is a private company running intel of this nature? From Allahpundit:
Fun bonus fact: SITE director Rita Katz claims White House counsel Fred Fielding told her that SITE had the video before the White House did, which is either nonsense they drummed up after the fact to lull Al Qaeda into thinking the feds are less hip to their game than a small, privately run intel organization or terrifying proof that the feds are, in fact, less hip to their game than a small, privately run intel organization.
But Jawa Report seems on to something else: perhaps the story is bogus. Jawa blogger Rusty reports that the ABC transcript of the video is dated September 6, 2007–but SITE claims to have given the video to the White House on September 7. He writes:
That means that the White House had a translation of the video a full 24 hours before SITE intercepted it. Apparently, our intel guys are better than we thought. Sure, the fools over at al Ekhlaas have closed down their back room, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other back rooms. So, just because SITE’s intel source got burned, doesn’t mean that we’ve lost capability of tracking al Qaeda online. In fact, SITE was not the only one that had the “new” bin Laden 9/11 video before it was supposed to be released, as these two articles suggest.
And, he posted the video himself on September 7. One thing is clear: This story needs to be investigated further before we can claim that this was a White House leak or major security breach.
