Letters to the Editor
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Hello Osama? It's Agent 4321
The really really funny thing is the idea, that any 'terrorist' anywhere, who, unlike the idiot King, is following this story would talk to anyone on a phone.
We heard a long time ago the "librul media" had tipped off Osama that the NSA was listening to his sat phone calls, and that nowadays he relies on couriers.
Now we are supposed to believe that there are terrorists who actually call the United States and discuss their plans on the phone? Does anyone believe that? Anyone?
If there is communication, it is, as I said by courier, or more likely, any number of essentially undetectable methods via the Internet. For instance a picture with steganographically encoded information could be posted on Flikr for 30 seconds at prearranged intervals. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography) If the embedded data was encrypted the chances of such a message being detected and decoded in anything like a timely manner are truly astronomical.
Failing that a simple encrypted file could be sent. The bad news is that the feds still can't decrypt data encrypted at a high enough level. For those of us who still hew to medieval concepts like privacy this also the good news.
No, data mining is aimed at dissidents and political opponents, at least those of them still naive enough to believe that the Stasi disappeared with the Berlin Wall, and who still think that a phone call is private.