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Terrorism at forefront of handheld technology
The terrorists who struck Mumbai last month stunned authorities with not only with their use of sophisticated weaponry but also with their comfort with modern technology.
The terrorists entered India via sea, with the help of a global positioning system handset. While under way, they communicated using a satellite phone with their handlers believed to have coordinated the attacks. They recognized their targets and knew the most direct routes to reach them in part because they had studied satellite photos from Google Earth.
Most significantly, throughout the three-day siege at two luxury hotels and a Jewish center, the handlers communicated with the attackers using Internet phones that complicate efforts to trace and intercept calls.
Those handlers, who were apparently watching the attacks unfold live on television, were able to inform the attackers of the movement of security forces from news accounts and provide the gunmen with instructions and encouragement, authorities said.
Now that global positioning systems and satellite phones have become easier to obtain and simpler to operate, terrorists, like everyone else, have become adept at using them. “
VoIP services, in which conversations are carried over the Internet as opposed to conventional phone lines or cellphone towers, are increasingly popular with people looking to save money on long distance and international calls. Many such services, like Skype and Vonage, allow a user to call another VoIP-enabled device anywhere in the world free of charge, or to call a standard telephone or cellphone at a deeply discounted rate.
But the same services are also increasingly popular with criminals and terrorists, a trend that worries some law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
In mid-October, a draft United States Army intelligence report highlighted the growing interest of Islamic militants in using VoIP, noting recent news reports of Taliban insurgents using Skype to communicate. The unclassified report, which examined discussions of emerging technologies on jihadi Web sites, was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based nonprofit group that monitors the impact of science on national security.
An agency using conventional tracing techniques to track a call from a land line or cellphone to a VoIP subscriber would be able to get only as far as the switching station that converts the voice call into Internet data, communications experts said. The switch, usually owned and operated by the company providing the VoIP service, could be located thousands of miles from the subscriber.
The subscriber’s phone number would also likely reveal no information about his location. For instance, someone in New York could dial a local phone number but actually be connected via the Internet to a person in Thailand.
Getting the I.P. address and then determining its location can take days longer than a standard phone trace, particularly if service providers involved are in a foreign country.
Further complicating this task is the fact that I.P. addresses change frequently and are less tied to a specific location than phone numbers.
Computer experts said that while these challenges were formidable, none were insurmountable. And they cautioned that security services and police forces might be disingenuous when they complain about terrorists’ use of new technologies, including VoIP.
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