Muslim extremists, including Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, are posting encrypted - or scrambled - photographs and messages on popular Web sites and using them to plan attacks against the United States and its allies, the USA Todaynewspaper claimed.
The newspaper quoted US law enforcement officials and experts as saying extremists were using email, computerised files, and encryption to hide maps and photographs of their targets, and instructions for carrying out attacks, on sports chat rooms, pornographic bulletin boards and other Web sites.
The Internet has become a new form of the "dead drop", a Cold War-era term for where spies left information, the paper quoted officials as saying.
They said the messages were scrambled using free encryption programs set up by groups that advocate privacy on the Internet. Those same programs also can hide maps and photographs in an existing image on selected Web sites.
The emails and images can only be decrypted using a private key, or code, selected by the recipient.
USA Todaysaid officials cited security concerns in declining to name sites where such material had been hidden. But experts said it was difficult for law enforcement agencies to intercept the messages.
Bin Laden, a dissident Saudi businessman, has been indicted for the 1998 bombing of two US embassies in East Africa and has been named as a possible suspect behind last autumn's bombing of the USS Coledestroyer in Yemen.
Four alleged bin Laden associates went on trial Tuesday in federal court in New York for the embassy bombings.
To a greater and greater degree, terrorist groups, including Hizbollah, Hamas, and bin Laden's al Qaida group, are using computerised files, e-mail, and encryption to support their operations, CIA Director George Tenet wrote last March to a closed-door session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to the USA Todayreport.
The paper quoted Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas, as saying in a recent interview in the Gaza Strip: "We will use whatever tools we can - emails, the Internet, to facilitate jihadagainst the [Israeli] occupiers and their supporters. We have the best minds working with us." Reuters