Posted on 06/19/2013 11:30:20 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In November 2008, Abid Naseer, a Pakistani student living in Manchester, England, began to e-mail a Yahoo account that was ultimately traced back to his home country. The young man’s e-mails appeared to be about young women — Nadia, Huma, Gulnaz and Fozia — and which of them would make a “faithful and loving wife.”
British investigators later determined that the four names were code for different types of explosives and that a final April 2009 e-mail announcing a “marriage to Nadia” between the 15th and the 20th was a signal that a terrorist attack in England was imminent, according to British court documents.
It is unclear exactly how British intelligence services linked the Pakistani e-mail address, sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com, to a senior al-Qaeda operative who communicated in a kind of pigeon code to his distant allies. But the intelligence helped stop the plot in England, and the address somehow made its way to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md.
A few months later, the NSA was monitoring the Yahoo user in Pakistan when a peculiar message arrived from a man named Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan American living in Aurora, Colo. He asked about “mixing of [flavor and ghee oil] and I do not know the amount, plz right away.”
A short time later, on Sept. 9, 2009, a second message arrived that echoed the code used in the British plot: “The marriage is ready,” Zazi wrote.
The e-mails led the NSA to alert the FBI, which obtained a court order to place Zazi under more extensive surveillance. Officials learned that he had visited Pakistan in 2008, the same time as one of the British plotters.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
>>The interesting takeaway I have from this is that these guys obviously never assumed that their email exchanges were safe... everything was in code.<<
And now thanks to the media we have told them how we broke the code. Aren’t we so smart?
Why is this story relevant to Prism? NSA was given a tip by the Brits, they ( FBI) obtained a warrant on “probable cause” and caught another terrorist. No ones objecting to that, except the terrorists. Fourth Amendment was honored. Has no relevance to Prism unless the Brits are doing the same and got the address originally thru a Prism type program they are operating.
What’s funny is we have foreign newspapers blowing the lid off of Obama’s monitoring with nary a peep from the domestics.
Then we have the domestic papers riding to Obama’s rescue, defending his practices.
HUMA! Where have I heard that name before?
Would that be dip for crackers?
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