Al Qaeda thought they were anonymous when they used their prepaid GSM phones. Needless to say, they were wrong. 🙂
Here’s the scoop on how the NSA and others tracked them down:
The terrorism investigation code-named Mont Blanc began almost by accident in April 2002, when authorities intercepted a cell phone call that lasted less than a minute and involved not a single word of conversation.
Investigators, suspicious that the call was a signal between terrorists, followed the trail first to one terror suspect, then to others, and eventually to terror cells on three continents.
What tied them together was a computer chip smaller than a fingernail. But before the investigation wound down in recent weeks, its global net caught dozens of suspected al-Qaida members and disrupted at least three planned attacks in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, according to counterterrorism and intelligence officials in Europe and the United States.