Quote:
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The desktop computer, it turned out, had been used mostly by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top deputy. It contained nearly a thousand text documents, dating back to 1997. Many were locked with passwords or encrypted. Most were in Arabic, but some were in French, Farsi, English, or Malay, written in an elliptical and evolving system of code words. I worked intensively for more than a year with several translators and with a colleague at The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Higgins, interviewing dozens of former jihadis to decipher the context, codes, and intentions of the messages for a series of articles that Higgins and I wrote for the Journal in 2002.
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Windows 95? (1997 reference). I would love to know the exact encryption program and algorithm used. If a reporter and some friends decrypted it, it wasn't strong. (although DES, the U. S. Government's Digital Encryption Standard at the time, 56 bit key, was considerd safe back then, due to Moore's law, it would have been cracked in hours at the time of the examination). Another possibility was the use of weak passwords/phrases, ie. "allah". Glad they didn't use real encryption and pass phrases.
P