Inside Al-Qaeda's "Intranet"

By Noah Shachtman
October 12, 2007 8:00:27 AM
Wired

New details are emerging about the Al-Qaeda "intranet" that went dark after an online Osama Bin Laden video was leaked last month.

Eli Lake at the New York Sun has the scoop on the network, known to American intelligence as "Obelisk."

Mr. Gunaratna yesterday referred to the network as the "password-protected sites."

They differ from public Al Qaeda sites used for recruitment and propaganda because the network of these "intranet" domains changes constantly and is used only for internal messaging, not for disseminating information to the public.

However, Obelisk sites often exist within public Al Qaeda sites.

Mr. Gunaratna said that Al Qaeda set up its Internet communications in three tiers:

The smallest circle includes senior leaders such as the head of the group's information committee, Abu Abdel Rahman al Magrebi, a son-in-law of Al Qaeda no. 2, Ayman al Zawahari.

Mr. Gunaratna estimated that this circle consisted of no more than 20 people, and was nearly impossible to penetrate although, he said, America, Britain, and Pakistan had a successful operation that penetrated Al Qaeda's most secretive Web communications for a period in 2004.

Then, after one of the founders of Al Qaeda's Internet system, Mohammed Naeem Nur Khan, had been arrested in secret by Pakistani intelligence in July 2004, allied intelligence services were able to monitor the communications of this leadership group for about five weeks through Mr. Khan's messages to the top tier committee.

The operation was blown after leaks to the Washington Post and New York Times, Mr. Gunaratna said, a breach he considers comparable to the leaking of Mr. bin Laden's speech.

The next tier of Al Qaeda's Internet communications consists of the password-protected sites, also known as Obelisk, and is used mainly by middle and lower-level Qaeda operatives.

"We refer to these as the password-protected sites," Mr. Gunaratna said.

"They are time-bound, they will work on this front only for certain people, they change Web sites constantly. You have to be plugged in, it's like a game, you have to hunt them."

What's still murky is who's responsible for the original leak.

Rita Katz of the SITE Institute claims the originally gave the Bin Laden footage to the White House, who then sent it over to Fox News. But ABC had a transcript of the video before that.

Did Katz leak to both places? Or, perhaps, as Lake tells DANGER ROOM, "Katz watched Obelisk, but it's like interlocking spider webs; she had one spider web, but others burrowed into different webs."

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