No phone/Internet for Osama. Dear pundits please explain

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ut-Napishtim
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Explain
Join the discussion
Registration is free. Ask a follow-up in this thread, or start your own.
Sign up Log in
12 replies · 9K views
Ut-Napishtim
Messages
27
Reaction score
0
As revealed by the CIA analysts they noticed that the suspicious house had no phone and Internet connections.

Could Osama have a CELLULAR phone with Internet (registered for somebody living far away) and use it (for reception only) outside of any means of detection??

Many thanks for attention and apologies if this question is stupid.
 

Discussion

Physics news on Phys.org
I don't see why not. Bin Laden's organization is also very familiar with satellite phones. However, the use of couriers is something else they've been using for years, so it would not be a big deal to not have landlines and internet connections.
 
[this is a computer question, not a physics question]

There is no such thing as a receive-only cell phone or internet connection. Both require two-way communications with a central station and a unique identifier of the holder of the connection.

The best one could hope for is a satellite phone or internet connection. The same rules apply, but the range is longer, so they are more difficult to pinpoint the location of...not impossible though, as they must transmit at a much higher power.
 
Dear Russ:

Many thanks for the explanation that there is no way having only reception for cell phone and the Internet.

That clears my stupid question.
 
Satellite phones and cell phones can be identified and tracked. If I recall correctly, a news story broke that the US several years ago was tracking OBL with hist sat-phone, after which he went "dark"...
 
Pengwuino said:
..., the use of couriers is something else they've been using for years, .

Apparently that was his fatal downfall...CIA tracked his courier.

PS. I'm pretty sure he never got the 72 virgins either. :)) he, he

Of course, that is not exactly a physics question.

...
 
It is theoretically possible to have a receive-only device, but no internet/cell phone wireless protocols support this. In theory it would be no different than having an encrypted radio.
 
Creator said:
I'm pretty sure he never got the 72 virgins either.

I would have thought that he did get the virgins, but who am I to argue such matters with Creator?
 
It's really simple: the nature of an effective guerrilla/terrorist/freedom-fighter network doesn't require a leader in a typical hierarchal sense. It's not like a corporation or government. Presuming OBL must be "in contact with subordinates" is misapplying the assumption of a hierarchy onto an organization is not a hierarchy.

Part of what such a network relies on is common knowledge and common ideology combined with bottom-up, emergent activity and action. There is no centralized top-down direction required! Basically folks look for opportunities of convenience and act on their own. They may get working capital from OBL but just as easily gotten from other local nodes in the network without OBL ever being involved directly.

And add to this: the costs of guerrilla force are orders of magnitude less than the costs of a conventional army or government bureaucracy - $1 of damage might cost $0.10 for guerrilla force but $1000 for an army/government. So the actual capital required is radically lower anyway. That makes decentralized action even easier.

To the extend that OBL did need to communicate (mostly to propagate ideology, approve spending/projects, but that can be delegated pretty easily also) it was all pretty "low bandwidth" information payloads. It's pretty clear that preserving "network cell" integrity is far more important to than efficiency of communication in that case.

So as news reports have said, he used "sneaker net" and "couriers". That makes perfect sense in this case. This is because any electronic communication system has the potential for tracking and tracing. The best countermeasure against high tech is low tech.

Of course the other possibility: it wasn't OBL.
 
Last edited:
We were able to intermittently pick up cell phone calls in our radio class in the army. I would imagine it wouldn't be a stretch to listen in on a call if you built a radio with that purpose in mind.
 
Pattonias said:
We were able to intermittently pick up cell phone calls in our radio class in the army. I would imagine it wouldn't be a stretch to listen in on a call if you built a radio with that purpose in mind.

Not even a little bit of stretch. Agilent (and others like Rhode-Schwartz) makes the http://www.home.agilent.com/agilent...536881883.00&lc=eng&cc=GB&pselect=SR.Looking" that exists.

With these, you can view the frequency domain of the comm band (GSM, WiMax, etc.) and pick off any transmission and then dive into any cell site code and pull out the audio data stream. Data streams can also be picked off. All passively. And even with cell hand-offs handled automatically (as long as the signal is strong enough from each cell).

It's quite trivial and "cheaply available" for $50K-$150K per rig. The NSA and other countries' intel/security services are their biggest customers for these (not just the USA!).

The only real issue: processing the audio to locate relevant conversations, translate them, recognize the value and then route along with billions of other "suspicious traffic". A human has to be at several parts of the loop with each being another weak point.

That's really the limitation - especially if the conversation is in Arabic, Pashtun, or any other similar language. There aren't enough people on the planet who can 1) speak the native language, and 2) speak English well enough, and 3) interpret the relevance of the conversation within military strategic/tactical utility, and 4) are willing to sign up for the US agenda and allegiance. The co-dependent probability ends up being <1/4E9 pretty easily.

There was recently a call from DARPA to create dictionaries of idiomatic expressions and cultural metaphors in all the world's languages. Why would DARPA care about that? Because if you are doing machine translation and machine triage on gathered ELINT like this, you need that for when folks "talk in code" using common linguistic metaphors of their language (intentionally or not).
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I think that Osama had so advanced professionals who could encode all his number and calls so that CIA wasn't able to trace them for a long time... Anyay, he had some means of communication, that's obvious.