[Gllug] Bomb the ISP's

John Edwards john_ed at cornerstonelinux.co.uk
Mon Sep 17 14:31:28 UTC 2001


On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 03:05:26PM +0100, Alain Williams wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 02:43:08PM +0100, Gordon Joly wrote:
>> 
>>> Didn't the BBC report that the Taliban had shutdown Afghanistan's links to
>>> the Internet a few months ago, citing the usual reason of immorallity, etc?
>>>
>>> That would have made it is little hard for any terrorists in Afghanistan to
>>> coordinate attacks via the Internet.
>> 
>> Unless they use satellite links?
> 
> No, the Taliban would never use satellite (think of the other immoral uses of
> satellite). This seems like an excellent use of RFC 1149 (IP Datagrams on
> Avian Carriers) - which I have only just realised was updated in 1999 by
> RFC 2549.

Hang on a minute wasn't Alan Cox involved in a top secret implementation 
of RFC 1149 in Norway about a year ago ? I don't think it involved any 
encryption in the protocal, but that still allows the use of encryption in 
the application layer. Maybe.... <SANITY CUTOUT>

Anyway it's probable that few people knew how these terrorists communicated 
otherwise any receipents of a message would have been under suspicion. Even 
when the contents of an email are encrypted it's sender, receipent and date 
are not, that's still more information than a secret group would want to 
have released. The only advantage that an email would have over a courier 
is that of speed and according to reports these attacks were planed over a 
long time.


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|    John Edwards, Email: John.Edwards at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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