Al-Qa'ida and Leaks

Apropos of the news that General (Ret.) James Cartwright is under investigation for allegedly leaking details of U.S. involvement in the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, two recent stories explore how al-Qa’ida takes advantages of U.S. intelligence leaks.

Yesterday the Associated Press reported that prosecutors in the PFC Bradley Manning court-martial introduced uncontested evidence that al-Qa’ida sought to benefit from the classified documents Manning downloaded and released through WikiLeaks, “urging members to study them before devising ways to attack the United States.”

Similarly, last week the AP’s Kimberly Dozier reported that intelligence officials are already observing changes in al-Qa’ida’s communications patterns in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leak revealing the NSA’s secret PRISM surveillance program. In particular, they say that al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula – the affiliate responsible for the “Underwear Bomber” who in 2009 nearly detonated an explosive on a flight to Detroit – “has been among the first to alter how it reaches out to its operatives. Dozier notes that Osama bin Laden quit using his Thuraya satellite phone in 1998 after newspapers revealed that U.S. intelligence was able to intercept his calls, and quotes one forensic intelligence expert as saying that many terrorists “are increasingly switching the temporary phones or SIM cards they use and throw them away more often” due to books and media coverage of how U.S. forces mine information from cellphones found at sites raided in war zones.