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Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post Staff Writers, report:

In the snow-draped mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban collapsed and al Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir watched “every second al Qaeda member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov” as they prepared to scatter into hiding and exile. On the screens were photographs of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.

Nearly four years later, al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Washington, DC - Today the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a release announcing its new rule expanding the reach of the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). The ruling is a reinterpretation of the scope of CALEA and will force Internet broadband providers and certain voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers to build backdoors into their networks that make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap them. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has argued against this expansion of CALEA in several rounds of comments to the FCC on its proposed rule.
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Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, reports:

Michael Lynn is a security researcher who worked at the security firm ISS until yesterday. Now he’s under a restraining order from Cisco, arising from his disclosure of critical flaws in Cisco’s routers that threaten the world’s information infrastructure.

Lynn had found a buffer overflow exploit that lets an attacker take absolute control over Cisco routers. He sent the details to Cisco in April, but they still have not fully repaired the vulnerability. Since many of the world’s key routers are supplied by Cisco, this means Cisco’s foot-dragging places large parts of the world’s information infrastructure at grave risk of collapse.
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Brian Grow, with Jason Bush in Moscow, BusinessWeek, via Slashdot, reports:

In an unmarked building in downtown Washington, Brian K. Nagel and 15 other Secret Service agents manned a high-tech command center, poised for the largest-ever roundup of a cybercrime gang. A huge map of the U.S., spread across 12 digital screens, gave them a view of their prey, from Arizona to New Jersey. It was Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004, and Operation Firewall was about to be unleashed. The target: the ShadowCrew, a gang whose members were schooled in identity theft, bank account pillage, and the fencing of ill-gotten wares on the Web, police say. For months, agents had been watching their every move through a clandestine gateway into their Web site, shadowcrew.com. To ensure the suspects were at home, a gang member-turned-informant had pressed his pals to go online for a group meeting.
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The BBC reports:

A spoof video of the song (Is This The Way To) Amarillo, performed by British soldiers in Iraq, has crashed Ministry of Defence computers.

Troops in the Royal Dragoon Guards shot a home video at their Al Faw base of their version of the video sung by Tony Christie and mimed by Peter Kay.

They e-mailed it to Army friends in London, but so many tried to download it that the MoD server could not cope.

The MoD said the spoof was “brilliant” and the crash did not cause problems.

A spokesman said: “The soldiers maintaining their morale on operations is always important.

“The fact that it proved so popular in the office and caused the system to crash is unfortunate, but this did not affect operations and the system is up and running again.”
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John Hering from Flexilis, with the new BlueSniper Rifle

Tom’s Networking, via Slashdot, writes:

Introduction

Watching the news these past few weeks, you would think that hackers have taken over our cellphones. From the Paris Hilton phone hack (which was not Bluetooth-based), to the unintentional release of Fred Durst’s (from the band Limp Bizkit) sex video - Wireless security has been thrust into the limelight. The proliferation of Bluetooth devices has made wireless communications easy and the Bluetooth group wants you to believe that this technology is safe from hackers. However, the guys from Flexilis, a wireless think-tank based in Los Angeles, beg to differ and they have a big freakin gun to “voice” their opinions.

The gun, which is called the BlueSniper rifle, can scan and attack Bluetooth devices from more than a mile away. The first version of the gun showed up at Defcon 2004, a hacker/computer security convention held annually in Las Vegas. You can read about it in Tom’s Hardware show coverage report here.

While the early version was held together with tie-straps and rubber bands, this newest version has a much more professional look. The team at Flexilis learned a lot from making their previous gun, and have made many improvements. The gun is now bigger, stronger and more durable and the antenna is almost twice a powerful as the older model. It also has a small computer which eliminates the need for lugging around a heavy laptop just to gather data.

How hard was it to make this gun? John Hering, from Flexilis, says, “The parts are easily available for a few hundred dollars and you can make this gun in a long afternoon.” In fact, in this two-part article, we will show you how to build your very own Bluetooth sniper rifle. A complete parts list is provided and we will document each step of the manufacturing process. We’ll also report on our test “shoot” of some famous high-rise buildings in downtown L.A., namely the US Bank / Library Tower and the AON Tower.
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CARA RUBINSKY, Associated Press Writer, reports:

GROTON, Conn. — The USS Jimmy Carter entered the Navy’s fleet Saturday as the most heavily armed submarine ever built, and as the last of the Seawolf class of attack subs that the Pentagon ordered during the Cold War’s final years.

The 453-foot, 12,000-ton submarine has a 50-torpedo payload and eight torpedo tubes. And, according to intelligence experts, it can tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through them.

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Reuters, via CNN, via Slashdot:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The U.S. Air Force quietly has put into service a new weapon designed to jam enemy satellite communications, a significant step toward U.S. control of space.

The so-called Counter Communications System was declared operational late last month at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the Air Force Space Command said Friday in e-mailed replies to questions from Reuters.

The ground-based jammer uses electromagnetic radio frequency energy to knock out transmissions on a temporary and reversible basis, without frying components, the command said.
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