Mumbai's tech savy terrorist

Washington Post:

The heavily armed attackers who set out for Mumbai by sea last week navigated with Global Positioning System equipment, according to Indian investigators and police. They carried BlackBerrys, CDs holding high-resolution satellite images like those used for Google Earth maps, and multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track. They spoke by satellite telephone. And as television channels broadcast live coverage of the young men carrying out the terrorist attack, TV sets were turned on in the hotel rooms occupied by the gunmen, eyewitnesses recalled.

This is terrorism in the digital age. Emerging details about the 60-hour siege of Mumbai suggest the attackers had made sophisticated use of high technology in planning and carrying out the assault that killed at least 174 people and wounded more than 300. The flood of information about the attacks -- on TV, cellphones, the Internet -- seized the attention of a terrified city, but it also was exploited by the assailants to direct their fire and cover their origins.

"Both sides used technology. The terrorists would not have been able to carry out these attacks had it not been for technology. They were not sailors, but they were able to use sophisticated GPS navigation tools and detailed maps to sail from Karachi [in Pakistan] to Mumbai," said G. Parthasarathy, an internal security expert at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. "Our new reality of modern life is that the public also sent text messages to relatives trapped in hotels and used the Internet to try and fight back."

During the attacks, an organization calling itself Deccan Mujaheddin asserted responsibility in an e-mail to news outlets that was traced to a computer server in Moscow, said Praveen Swami, a terrorism expert and media commentator. The message, it was later discovered, originated in Lahore, Pakistan. Investigators have said the e-mail was produced using Urdu-language voice-recognition software to "anonymatize" regional spellings and accents so police would be unable to identify their ethnic or geographic origins.

When the gunmen communicated with their leaders, they used satellite telephones and called voice-over-Internet-protocol phone numbers, making them harder to trace, Swami said. Then, once on the scene, they snatched cellphones from hostages and used those to stay in contact with one another.

At every point, Swami said, the gunmen used technology to gain a tactical advantage.

"This was technologically a pretty sophisticated group. They navigated their way to Mumbai using a state-of-the-art GPS system. Most of their rehearsals to familiarize themselves with Mumbai were done on high-resolution satellite maps, so they would have a good feel for the city's streets and buildings where they were going," Swami said, adding that the CDs containing maps and videos were found in some of the hotel rooms the gunmen had occupied during the siege.

The lone captured gunman, Azam Amir Kasab, told police that he was shown video footage of the targets and the satellite images before the attacks, said Deven Bharti, a deputy commissioner in the crime branch of the Mumbai police.

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The security forces on the ground, including the country's elite special forces unit popularly known as the Black Cats, had little access to night-vision goggles or thermal-imaging capability to help pinpoint where people were located in the two hotels under siege, he said. The elite 7,400-member National Security Guard -- whose commandos arrived in Mumbai at least eight hours after the attackers struck to dislodge them from the hotels -- does not have its own aircraft, Sahni said.

"When they finally got there, they had no floor layouts of the hotel, let alone high-tech devices," he added.

Investigators and eyewitnesses have reported that the assailants had TVs on, tuned to live broadcasts of the assault, as the commandos prepared to storm the hotels.

When TV stations showed every twist and turn of the masked Black Cat commandos sliding down ropes from helicopters to rooftops near a Jewish center called the Chabad House, the Mumbai government shut down news channels, taking live coverage off the air for 45 minutes, fearing that the attackers were monitoring the screens, ruining the commandos' crucial element of surprise.

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There is more.

Look, GPS is nice, but it does not take great skill to navigate from Karachi to Mumbai. Come on. People have been doing that for thousands of years. The GPS might save a few minutes once in Mumbai in landing at a particular location. It might save some time in going from one point of attack to another, but it is not like they had GPS guided munitions are smart bombs.

They were pretty clever in the use of communications, but that very use is now giving investigators a treasure trove of intelligence, not only on their activities, but who was giving them directions in the rear. We are already seeing the names of the suspected masterminds behind the attacks.

Yes, it was not smart to show a live commando raid. That is just bad judgment by the TV media. Yes, the India authorities need to beef up their own tech savy operations to make it easier to respond.

As for the layout of the hotels, I would have started with the hotel web sites and then gone to local government sources. It is not that unusual for a large and expensive hotel to have layout maps at the front desk if not online. At the Taj link you can take a virtual tour of the facilities.