Bin Laden Used USB Sticks to Send Messages

The revelations, made by an anonymous US official to the Associated Press, offer insight into why Bin Laden proved so hard to locate through his Internet activity. Lacking an Internet or phone connection at his Pakistan residence, he devised a system in which he composed messages to terrorist associates on a computer, which were at that time copied to a USB stick, presumably using some form of encryption.

This stick was at that time carried to a remote computer in an Internet cafe by a courier from where it the message was sent to its intended recipient - replies where ferried back using the same laborious nevertheless hard-to-trace method.

Large number of people over time

Bin Laden communicated with a large number of people over time and he would have needed some way of understanding the context of his communications. That would have given a reason to keep or rather than destroy each stick.

USB sticks have become the high-capacity portable storage research of choice in afterwards Bin Laden's New York attacks, so in one respect anyway the terrorist leader who shunned modern communications has been keeping up with the latest advances.

Ironically, the same innovation has given the Americans data security headaches too, which caused the US Air Force to ban their use for a second time in December 2010.