Subject: [NEXTEL-1] CSM - "Via [cell phone] eavesdropping, terror suspects nabbed"

From: NEXTEL-1
Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 15:12:49 -0400

-------- Original Message --------
From: Anthony Townsend <[email-masked]>
Subject:  CSM - "Via [cell phone] eavesdropping, terror suspects nabbed"
To: "Urban Technology & Telecommunications" 

from the June 02, 2004 edition - 
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0602/p02s01-usmi.html

Via eavesdropping, terror suspects nabbed
Intelligence officials use cellphone signals to track Al Qaeda 
operatives, as number of mid-level arrests rises.

By Faye Bowers | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

  WASHINGTON - An ordinary-looking grid map of Riyadh adorns one wall of 
a command-and-control center deep inside a government building in Saudi 
Arabia's capital.

The map is higher-tech than it appears at first glance. Tiny embedded 
lights flash red when certain cellphones - those belonging to suspected 
terrorists - initiate or receive a call. Teams of officials from Saudi 
Arabia, the FBI, the CIA, and the US Treasury Department decide 
instantly whether simply to watch and listen to the suspected terrorist 
- or to send in screaming police cars to nab him.

So far, officials say, this technology - and others - has enabled them 
to interrupt several terror plots and nab dozens of suspected 
terrorists. Certainly it hasn't served as a panacea, as the attacks on 
foreign workers in Saudi Arabia's oil-worker compounds last weekend 
show. At least 22 people, including one American, were killed when 
terrorists stormed a compound where foreign oil workers lived. One 
terrorist was captured, while three others escaped using hostages as 
shields.

It doesn't take long for terrorists to figure out how authorities are 
tracing them and then change methods. Still, the technology has proved 
helpful in rolling up cells in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, 
and America. "Today, gumshoe is really a lot more electronics," says 
Peter Crooks, a retired FBI agent who specialized in counterterrorism. 
"They have some pretty sophisticated equipment."
Recent progress

Cooperating officials in many countries have been quietly chipping away 
at terror cells over the past several months. Recent progress includes:

• Japan arrested five foreigners with suspected ties to Al Qaeda on May 
26. Pakistan had detained four others on May 24.

• The Saudi government killed five suspected militants in the Buraida 
area on May 21.

• On May 6, the Philippines arrested an alleged cell leader with Jemaah 
Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian group tied to Al Qaeda.

• Spanish police arrested a Moroccan April 27, and said it was seeking 
five others for roles in the March 11 Madrid train bombings. So far, 19 
have been detained for their roles in those bombings.

• South Africa deported five Al Qaeda members on April 9. Government 
officials there claim the moves led to the detentions of several others 
in Jordan.

• Jordan foiled what it called the most serious attempt yet to 
overthrow its government on April 9. Four terrorists were killed and 
three detained after they attempted to use chemical weapons and truck 
bombs against several government targets, including the prime 
minister's office and the US Embassy there.

Terrorists, of course, catch on to the new tracking procedures and seek 
safer ways to communicate. Osama bin Laden, for example, stopped using 
satellite phones because he found out - with the delivery of a guided 
missile - that the US was tracking his position via the satellite.

But terrorists found a new system that enabled them to use phones that 
were difficult, if not impossible, to track.

SIM cards, for Subscriber Identity Model, were developed to create a 
universal - and cheaper - cellphone system. Under the old approach, a 
resident from, say, Britain would be charged at a local rate when 
making cellphone calls in England. But if he were to travel to Germany, 
he would be charged long distance rates. Under the new system, he can 
buy a German SIM card - which contains a fingernail-sized computer chip 
- and make the same calls at local rates.

The information on pricing, minutes, and local telephone numbers is 
encoded in the chip. But since there is no need for a local record of 
the purchaser's name and credit information, as there is when setting 
up a land line or a traditional cellphone account, it makes it easier 
for people to use phones undetected.

"What we're seeing is that people who want to remain invisible to law 
enforcement are doing things like this in order to evade 
interceptions," says a telecommunications engineer who's helped develop 
ways to track cellphone users. Still, he adds, "this doesn't make you 
immune from interceptions."

After years of tracking terrorists, investigators have amassed a large 
database of land-line and traditional cellphone numbers they are 
watching (or listening to). All it takes is a call from one of those 
numbers to a phone with a SIM card to discover who's using the 
undetectable phone.
How one arrest happened

This is what led investigators to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 
mastermind of the 9/11 plot, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 
2003. A suspected terrorist whom German authorities were watching 
placed a call to someone with a cellphone in Pakistan on April 11, 
2002.

No one spoke. But authorities said the call was made to alert Mr. 
Mohammed that an attack on German tourists visiting Tunisia was about 
to take place, which it did, later that day. Authorities began tracking 
the SIM card, which Mohammed supposedly moved from phone to phone, 
creating problems in locating his position.

But pinpointing the location of the phone was much easier. 
Investigators tracked it by analyzing the signals from different 
cellphone towers. The time it takes a signal to "propagate and return 
back tells how far the cellphone is from the tower," says an engineer. 
The reason the red lights flash so quickly in the Saudi command and 
control center is that "the timing is nearly simultaneous," he says.

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