Lewis: Mining Bin Laden's computer trove

James Andrew Lewis is a senior fellow and director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Killing Osama bin Laden was symbolically important for our conflict with jihadis, and its political effects will reverberate for months. Al-Qaida's surviving leaders -- there are at least 20 -- must be worried about the political damage, but they may also have something more important to worry about.

The Navy SEALs who killed bin Laden seized computers, disks, and other tech and data storage equipment from his home, giving the United States access to bin Laden's records, plans and thoughts. We've already heard reports that some data contained brainstorming about attacking U.S. trains.

The value of the equipment seized depends to some extent on bin Laden's role in al-Qaida. The organization has "franchised" into many self-governing groups that share a common brand and strategy. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is one franchise, as is al-Qaida in Iraq, and there are three or four others. There may be some loose coordination among the groups in recruitment, funding or training, but each operates independently. If bin Laden was merely a symbol and a source of inspiration, rather than a chief executive officer, we might not gain full insight into the plans of these autonomous operations.

But even if bin Laden wasn't serving as al-Qaida's CEO, there will almost certainly be immense amounts of data on those seized computers. There may be evidence pointing to al-Qaida's wealthy Arabian funders, for instance. Bin Laden knew how the franchises were led, and how to get in touch with them. This information will help intelligence agencies do a better job of mapping how al-Qaida is organized. He would also have notes and communications on the Taliban.

There might even be evidence of al-Qaida's relationship with Pakistan's security services. Bin Laden lived in a giant mansion half a mile from a Pakistani military academy in a town filled with high-ranking officers. Our relations with Pakistan are at an all-time low, but if we find that they hid bin Laden for a decade, it will confirm what we already suspect: that Pakistan cultivates terrorists, even if they attack Americans, and that the $2 billion in aid we send every year is wasted.

Earlier computer captures show us what will happen. In 2008, Colombian soldiers found and killed the leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Marxist rebels who have been engaged in a decades-long civil war. The soldiers also captured FARC leaders' computers and found an immense quantity of data -- including evidence that Venezuela was supporting FARC and of FARC's plans to acquire surface-to-air missiles. Killing the leaders and capturing their computers is a double blow to any terrorist group.

Bin Laden was pretty shrewd when it came to communications. In the 1990s, he discovered that the United States could intercept his satellite telephone calls. He immediately stopped using the phone. Al-Qaida's leaders have a professional approach to communications security -- someone, somewhere, must have trained them. Although it became a telltale indicator, his house in Pakistan had no Internet or phone connections, to avoid eavesdropping.

Bin Laden adopted a system of recording his messages and email onto computer disks or thumb drives and having a courier take them to another location to be loaded onto the Internet and sent to their recipients. This "sneaker-net" -- so named because it used runners rather than the World Wide Web, slowed his ability to coordinate and lead but shielded him from U.S. surveillance. Now, some of these CDs are in U.S. hands, as are his thumb drives, laptops and removable hard drives.

If bin Laden was really professional, his files will not refer to his sources and contacts by name but by cryptonym -- a code or false name that would shield their identities. But using cryptonyms is a lot of work, and usually there's a file somewhere that links false names to the real identities. People can be lazy, and one thing the SEALs probably looked for was to see if bin Laden, like so many others, had the "yellow sticky" stuck somewhere close, where he had written passwords or file names. The Russian spies arrested in New York last year, after all their training, still couldn't resist writing down passwords; bin Laden might have done the same.

But even if he took extra steps to secure his data, U.S. intelligence agents can now take all the time they need to sort out his computers, hard drives and disks. We are unlikely to find operational plans from the al-Qaida franchises -- the train-attack scheme was characterized by House Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) as "a rambling aspiration" -- but there will be a wealth of detail on strategies, members and leadership.

The files may pose challenges if he encrypted them, but the challenges are only temporary. The careful handling of captured hard drives and computers has become an art form over the past 20 years. Three U.S. agencies -- the FBI, NSA and CIA -- all have strong capabilities to recover, read and copy computer files. Handling digital evidence is a crucial part of law enforcement, and the ability to decrypt and read communications is essential for intelligence.

Technical experts carefully copy the files. Those that are in plain text are immediately available. Protected files may take days or even weeks to read. The assembled data is passed to translators and analysts, who will pore over the hundreds or thousands of pages of information we have captured for every useful fact.

Bin Laden's death is really the first act in a long drama that will play out over months as the United States accesses, analyzes and acts on the information it has captured. While some al-Qaida leaders might have felt a surge of ambition with their leader's death -- now they can aspire to be the sheik -- they must also feel a real fear. Bin Laden's digital data in U.S. hands makes them vulnerable in ways they cannot assess. And in the long run, this will be as dangerous to them -- or more -- as the loss of their charismatic and committed leader.