Al Qaeda's command and control problem

One of al Qaeda's real vulnerabilities is its inability to communicate directly with its operatives. Most of its communications must be through primitive hand delivered messages and runners. Even when it tries to use the internet its message is subject to being intercepted. This was true recently with the bin Laden tape which was found by a 50 year old woman in the US who haunts the jihadi web sites. AP recently did a story on Laura Mansfield to find out how she did it.

Once her son is off to school, Laura Mansfield settles in at her dining room table with her laptop and begins trolling Arabic-language message boards and chat rooms popular with jihadists.

Fluent in Arabic, the self-employed terror analyst often hacks into the sites, translates the material, puts it together and sends her analysis via a subscription service to intelligence agencies, law enforcement and academics.

Occasionally she comes across a gem, such as when she found a recent Osama bin Laden video — before al-Qaida had announced it.

"I realized, oh my gosh, I'm sitting here, I'm a fat 50-year-old mom and I've managed to scoop al-Qaida," said Mansfield, who uses that name as a pseudonym because she receives death threats.

She sometimes spends 100 hours a week online, and she often finds items after word has begun spreading on the Arabic forums of an imminent release.

"It's really important to understand what the jihadists think and how they're planning on doing things," she said. "They're very vocal. They tell us what they're going to do and then they go out and do it."

Mansfield tips off her intelligence sources when she does find something new, part of an informal working relationship with the government.

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The Jawa Report usually is one of the first to get her material on the web. But, the real significance of her story is that al Qaeda's communications are always vulnerable even to housewives in the US. You can guess what the NSA is looking at. I wonder if the Democrats think she is invading the terrorist privacy?