ABC News Leak Shuts Off Al Qaeda Intelligence

An ABC News leak has compromised the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to track Al Qaeda's internet activities:

Al Qaeda's Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden's September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy's system.

The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden's first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the morning of September 7, the Web site of ABC News posted excerpts from the speech.

But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda's internal security division that the organization's Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. This network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda's production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.

While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda.

The desperation by the media to be "first with the story" has resulted in the compromise of numerous anti-terrorist programs and one of these days Americans will died because of the irresponsibility of the press.

The Washington Post blames the leak on Administration officials who mishandled the information coming from a private security firm. Certainly somebody in the Administration had to release the info to ABC, but isn't it funny that suddenly leaks are bad again? When the Post and the NY Times were releasing information about Bush administration anti-terrorist policies and compromising those programs, I don't remember hearing that those leaks were bad.