Osama bin Laden thwarted the American's multi-trillion dollar search for him with a just a few dollars of gas money every week. Osama was a genius in his strategic skills given that he was greatly out numbered and out resourced. He knew a super power like the US would spend anything it costs to kill him even if it bankrupted their country, therefore all he had to do was keep taunting them with a message every so often. He learned this lesson well from his time terrorizing the Soviets when he worked for the Americans. The Americans did not "win" against Al Qaeda and the Taliban when they killed bin Laden, since bin Laden had already dealt his multi-trillion dollar blow with the most meagre of resources.WASHINGTON – Despite having no Internet access in his hideout, Osama bin Laden was a prolific email writer who built a painstaking system that kept him one step ahead of the U.S. government's best eavesdroppers.
His methods, described in new detail to The Associated Press by a counterterrorism official and a second person briefed on the U.S. investigation, served him well for years and frustrated Western efforts to trace him through cyberspace. The arrangement allowed bin Laden to stay in touch worldwide without leaving any digital fingerprints behind.
The people spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive intelligence analysis.
Bin Laden's system was built on discipline and trust. But it also left behind an extensive archive of email exchanges for the U.S. to scour. The trove of electronic records pulled out of his compound after he was killed last week is revealing thousands of messages and potentially hundreds of email addresses, the AP has learned.
Holed up in his walled compound in northeast Pakistan with no phone or Internet capabilities, bin Laden would type a message on his computer without an Internet connection, then save it using a thumb-sized flash drive. He then passed the flash drive to a trusted courier, who would head for a distant Internet cafe.
At that location, the courier would plug the memory drive into a computer, copy bin Laden's message into an email and send it. Reversing the process, the courier would copy any incoming email to the flash drive and return to the compound, where bin Laden would read his messages offline.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_bin_laden
