[weegee]

Apply pressure on their service provider. Names, addresses, "wire" taps.

[weegee]

Let me add to that, anytime a terrorist is apprehended, follow the trail. Get phone records while you are at it.

I am not talking about this from strictly a US courts approach either. This is international.

[anymouse]

Apparently these guys never heard of the NSA.

Thuraya was built by the same Boeing (was Hughes) that builds satellites for US military customers. You can bet that nothing gets transmitted through Thuraya satellites without a copy sent through NSA computers.

The communications architecture doesn't go straight from sat-phone to satellite to sat-phone. It goes sat-phone to satellite to ground station to satellite to sat-phone. It doesn't take a NSA spook to figure out how to make sure all sat-phone communications are monitored.