Spy chiefs warn of al-Qaeda 'bombs and computers' plot

Counter-terrorism experts call it a 'force multiplier': an attack combining slaughter and electronic chaos. Now Britain's security services want total access to commuters' travel records to help them meet the threat

Millions of commuters could have their private movements around cities secretly monitored under new counter-terrorism powers being sought by the security services.

Records of journeys made by people using smart cards that allow 17 million Britons to travel by underground, bus and train with a single swipe at the ticket barrier are among a welter of private information held by the state to which MI5 and police counter-terrorism officers want access in order to help identify patterns of suspicious behaviour.

The request by the security services, described by shadow Home Secretary David Davis last night as 'extraordinary', forms part of a fierce Whitehall debate over how much access the state should have to people's private lives in its efforts to combat terrorism.

It comes as the Cabinet Office finalises Gordon Brown's new national security strategy, expected to identify a string of new threats to Britain - ranging from future 'water wars' between countries left drought-ridden by climate change to cyber-attacks using computer hacking technology to disrupt vital elements of national infrastructure.

The fear of cyber-warfare has climbed Whitehall's agenda since last year's attack on the Baltic nation of Estonia, in which Russian hackers swamped state servers with millions of electronic messages until they collapsed. The Estonian defence and foreign ministries and major banks were paralysed, while even its emergency services call system was temporarily knocked out: the attack was seen as a warning that battles once fought by invading armies or aerial bombardment could soon be replaced by virtual, but equally deadly, wars in cyberspace.

While such new threats may grab headlines, the critical question for the new security agenda is how far Britain is prepared to go in tackling them. What are the limits of what we want our security services to know? And could they do more to identify suspects before they strike?

One solution being debated in Whitehall is an unprecedented unlocking of data held by public bodies, such as the Oyster card records maintained by Transport for London and smart cards soon to be introduced in other cities in the UK, for use in the war against terror. The Office of the Information Commissioner, the watchdog governing data privacy, confirmed last night that it had discussed the issue with government but declined to give details, citing issues of national security.

Currently the security services can demand the Oyster records of specific individuals under investigation to establish where they have been, but cannot trawl the whole database. But supporters of calls for more sharing of data argue that apparently trivial snippets - like the journeys an individual makes around the capital - could become important pieces of the jigsaw when fitted into a pattern of other publicly held information on an individual's movements, habits, education and other personal details. That could lead, they argue, to the unmasking of otherwise undetected suspects.

Critics, however, fear a shift towards US-style 'data mining', a controversial technique using powerful computers to sift and scan millions of pieces of data, seeking patterns of behaviour which match the known profiles of terrorist suspects. They argue that it is unfair for millions of innocent people to have their privacy invaded on the off-chance of finding a handful of bad apples.

'It's looking for a needle in a haystack, and we all make up the haystack,' said former Labour minister Michael Meacher, who has a close interest in data sharing. 'Whether all our details have to be reviewed because there is one needle among us - I don't think the case is made.'

Jago Russell, policy officer at the campaign group Liberty, said technological advances had made 'mass computerised fishing expeditions' easier to undertake, but they offered no easy answers. 'The problem is what do you do once you identify somebody who has a profile that suggests suspicions,' he said. 'Once the security services have identified somebody who fits a pattern, it creates an inevitable pressure to impose restrictions.'

Individuals wrongly identified as suspicious might lose high-security jobs, or have their immigration status brought into doubt, he said. Ministers are also understood to share concerns over civil liberties, following public opposition to ID cards, and the debate is so sensitive that it may not even form part of Brown's published strategy.

But if there is no consensus yet on the defence, there is an emerging agreement on the mode of attack. The security strategy will argue that in the coming decades Britain faces threats of a new and different order. And its critics argue the government is far from ready.

The cyber-assault on Estonia confirmed that the West now faces a relatively cheap, low-risk means of warfare that can be conducted from anywhere in the world, with the power to plunge developed nations temporarily into the stone age, disabling everything from payroll systems that ensure millions of employees get paid to the sewage treatment processes that make our water safe to drink or the air traffic control systems keeping planes stacked safely above Heathrow.

And it is one of the few weapons which is most effective against more sophisticated western societies, precisely because of their reliance on computers. 'As we become more advanced, we become more vulnerable,' says Alex Neill, head of the Asia Security programme at the defence think-tank RUSI, who is an expert on cyber-attack.

The nightmare scenario now emerging is its use by terrorists as a so-called 'force multiplier' - combining a cyber-attack to paralyse the emergency services with a simultaneous atrocity such as the London Tube bombings.

Victims would literally have nowhere to turn for help, raising the death toll and sowing immeasurable panic. 'Instead of using three or four aircraft as in 9/11, you could do one major event and then screw up the communications network behind the emergency services, or attack the Underground control network so you have one bomb but you lock up the whole network,' says Davis. 'You take the ramifications of the attack further. The other thing to bear in mind is that we are ultimately vulnerable because London is a financial centre.'

In other words, cyber-warfare does not have to kill to bring a state to its knees: hackers could, for example, wipe electronic records detailing our bank accounts, turning millionaires into apparent paupers overnight.

So how easy would it be? Estonia suffered a relatively crude form of attack known as 'denial of service', while paralysing a secure British server would be likely to require more sophisticated 'spy' software which embeds itself quietly in a computer network and scans for secret passwords or useful information - activating itself later to wreak havoc.

Neill said that would require specialist knowledge to target the weakest link in any system: its human user. 'You will get an email, say, that looks like it's from a trusted colleague, but in fact that email has been cloned. There will be an attachment that looks relevant to your work: it's an interesting document, but embedded in it invisibly is "malware" rogue software which implants itself in the operating systems. From that point, the computer is compromised and can be used as a platform to exploit other networks.'

Only governments and highly sophisticated criminal organisations have such a capability now, he argues, but there are strong signs that al-Qaeda is acquiring it: 'It is a hallmark of al-Qaeda anyway that they do simultaneous bombings to try to herd victims into another area of attack.'

The West, of course, may not simply be the victim of cyber-wars: the United States is widely believed to be developing an attack capability, with suspicions that Baghdad's infrastructure was electronically disrupted during the 2003 invasion.

So given its ability to cause as much damage as a traditional bomb, should cyber-attack be treated as an act of war? And what rights under international law does a country have to respond, with military force if necessary? Next month Nato will tackle such questions in a strategy detailing how it would handle a cyber-attack on an alliance member. Suleyman Anil, Nato's leading expert on cyber-attack, hinted at its contents when he told an e-security conference in London last week that cyber-attacks should be taken as seriously as a missile strike - and warned that a determined attack on western infrastructure would be 'practically impossible to stop'.

Tensions are likely to increase in a globalised economy, where no country can afford to shut its borders to foreign labour - an issue graphically highlighted for Gordon Brown weeks into his premiership by the alleged terrorist attack on Glasgow airport, when it emerged that the suspects included overseas doctors who entered Britain to work in the NHS.

A review led by Homeland Security Minister Admiral Sir Alan West into issues raised by the Glasgow attack has been grappling with one key question: could more be done to identify rogue elements who are apparently well integrated with their local communities?

Which is where, some within the intelligence community insist, access to personal data already held by public bodies - from the Oyster register to public sector employment records - could come in. The debate is not over yet.

C.I.A. Secretly Held Qaeda Suspect, Officials Say

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency secretly detained a suspected member of Al Qaeda for at least six months beginning last summer as part of a program in which C.I.A. officers have been authorized by President Bush to use harsh interrogation techniques, American officials said Friday.

The suspect, Muhammad Rahim, is the first Qaeda prisoner in nearly a year who intelligence officials have acknowledged has been in C.I.A. detention. The C.I.A. emptied its secret prisons in the fall of 2006, when it moved 14 prisoners to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but made clear that the facilities could be used in the future to house high-level terrorism suspects.

Mr. Bush has defended the use of the secret prisons as a vital tool in American counterterrorism efforts, and last July he signed an executive order that formally reiterated the C.I.A.’s authority to use interrogation techniques more coercive than those permitted by the Pentagon.

Mr. Bush used his veto power last weekend to block legislation that would have prohibited the agency from using the techniques, and this week the House of Representatives failed to override the veto.

Military and intelligence officials said that Mr. Rahim was transferred earlier this week to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay. In a message to agency employees on Friday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said Mr. Rahim had been put into the C.I.A. program because of “his past and the continuing threat he presented to American interests.”

Intelligence officials would not say whether the C.I.A. had used any of what it calls an approved list of “enhanced” interrogation techniques against Mr. Rahim during his months in secret detention.

“This detention, like others, was conducted in accordance with U.S. law,” said Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman. He declined to say whether the C.I.A. currently had custody of any other prisoners.

Government officials described Mr. Rahim, an Afghan who has fought battles for two decades, as a Qaeda planner and facilitator who at times in recent years had been a translator for Osama bin Laden.

They said he was captured and detained by local forces last summer in a country they would not name before being transferred to C.I.A. custody. Pakistani newspapers reported last summer that Pakistani operatives arrested Mr. Rahim in Lahore in August.

Before Mr. Rahim, the last prisoner the C.I.A. acknowledged it had detained was Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, an Iraqi Kurd held by the agency for six months before being transferred to Guantánamo last April.

In his message to C.I.A. employees on Friday, General Hayden called Mr. Rahim a “tough, seasoned jihadist” with “high-level contacts” who at times had served as a personal translator for Mr. bin Laden. The message said that in 2001, Mr. Rahim helped prepare the Afghan cave complex of Tora Bora as a hideout for Qaeda fighters fleeing the American-led offensive.

According to an American counterterrorism official, Mr. Rahim is in his 40s and is a native of Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan, a rugged mountain territory that has long been a hive of jihadi activity.

The counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that Mr. Rahim had attended radical madrasas, or religious schools, in Pakistan.

The Bush administration last month formally charged six Qaeda operatives said to have been involved in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. Five of the six detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, had been in C.I.A. custody until September 2006, when they were among the 14 prisoners moved to Guantánamo.

Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty against the six men, government officials have said. During a speech on Friday in London, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said he hoped that the six men would not receive the death penalty. If they were to be executed, he said, “they would see themselves as martyrs.”

Also on Friday, a lawyer representing Majid Khan, who had spent more than three years in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons, briefed Senate Intelligence Committee staff members on her client’s description of his treatment there as torture. The lawyer, Gitanjali Gutierrez of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is the first lawyer to speak to Congress after meeting with a prisoner who was in the C.I.A. program.

The 90-minute meeting was closed, and Ms. Gutierrez said that she could not reveal what Mr. Khan had said about his treatment because the government declared prisoners’ statements to be classified.

Ms. Gutierrez said her testimony was aimed at giving Congress independent information on the C.I.A. program, which she said “is operating criminally, shamefully and dangerously.” C.I.A. officials say all of the agency’s interrogation techniques were lawful at the time they were used.

Pentagon Cites Tapes Showing Interrogations

The Defense Department is conducting an extensive review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantánamo Bay, and so far it has identified nearly 50 tapes, including one that showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a terrorism suspect.

The Pentagon review was begun in late January after the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged that it had destroyed its own videotapes of harsh interrogations conducted by C.I.A. officers, an action that is now the subject of criminal and Congressional investigations.

The review was intended in part to establish clearer rules for any videotaping of interrogations, Defense officials said. But they acknowledged that it had been complicated by inconsistent taping practices in the past, as well as uncertain policies for when tapes could be destroyed or must be preserved.

The officials said it appeared that only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of interrogations worldwide since 2001 had been recorded.

The officials said the nearly 50 tapes they identified documented interrogations of two terrorism suspects, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri, and were made at a Navy detention site in Charleston, S.C., where the two men have been held.

The initial findings of the Pentagon review represent the first official acknowledgment that military interrogators had videotaped some sessions with detainees and could widen the controversy over the treatment of prisoners in American custody. A Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell, cautioned that the review was incomplete, and a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Don Black, said that interrogation videotapes had been routinely destroyed if they were judged to have no continuing value.

The only tape described by officials is of Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was arrested in December 2001 while in college in Illinois and moved five years ago to the jail after being designated an “enemy combatant.” Government officials say they believe he was an operative for Al Qaeda who was plotting attacks.

Two government officials said that the tape showed Mr. Marri being manhandled by his interrogators, but did not show waterboarding or any other treatment approaching what they believed could be classified as torture. According to one Defense Department official, the interrogators dispensing the rough treatment on the tape were F.B.I. agents.

An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment, citing a continuing review of detention practices that is being carried out by the Department of Justice’s inspector general.

Mr. Black, the spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said its director, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, had reviewed the tape and was satisfied that Mr. Marri’s treatment was acceptable.

He said that Mr. Marri was chanting loudly, disrupting his interrogation, and that interrogators used force to put duct tape on his mouth, while Mr. Marri resisted. Mr. Black said most of the videos showing Mr. Marri’s interrogations had been destroyed. The government has never charged Mr. Marri, but because of his designation as an enemy combatant, the Pentagon is allowed to hold him indefinitely.

The scale of detention and interrogation by the military, with tens of thousands of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, dwarfs that of the C.I.A., which has held fewer than 100 high-level Qaeda suspects. The C.I.A. has acknowledged videotaping only two terrorism suspects, in 2002, and military officials said that the review, ordered in late January by James R. Clapper, the Pentagon’s senior intelligence official, had similarly found that only a small number of detainee interrogations had been videotaped.

“This is not a widespread practice,” said Mr. Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. He said that it was up to individual military commanders whether to tape interrogations and that the videotapes were often used as the basis of written intelligence reports. In addition to the existing interrogation videotapes, there are existing recordings that show interactions between military guards and terrorism suspects, including detainees’ forcible removal from cells at Guantánamo, military officials said.

Images of rough treatment of detainees is a delicate subject for the Pentagon. Soldiers’ snapshots of the abusive treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq set off a firestorm and led to prison terms for a number of military personnel.

Congress imposed a ban in 2005 on all harsh interrogation methods by the military but left a loophole for the C.I.A. Last month, Congress voted to extend the ban to the C.I.A., but President Bush vetoed the bill.

The C.I.A. acknowledged in December that in 2005 it had destroyed the only interrogation videotapes that its officers had made; the tapes showed two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al- Rahim al-Nashiri.

Lawyers for Mr. Marri, who have challenged his imprisonment in court, sought access to any tapes or other records of his interrogations, but in 2006 a federal judge in South Carolina said the government did not have to produce any tapes. That decision is being appealed.

Jonathan Hafetz, one of the lawyers, said Mr. Marri had heard guards describe “a cabinet full of tapes” showing his interrogations, but had never had independent confirmation that such tapes existed. Mr. Marri has alleged that earlier in his imprisonment he was deprived of sleep, isolated and exposed to prolonged cold.

Mr. Hafetz said he planned to file papers in court on Thursday describing the psychological harm done to Mr. Marri. “Locking someone up for five years without charges is a disgrace and a betrayal of American and constitutional values,” he said.

The difficulties in the Pentagon’s review can be glimpsed in a seven-page court filing last month by Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, the military commander at Guantánamo Bay.

Admiral Buzby’s report describes an array of digital video recorders used to capture “activities” — it does not specify whether interrogations are included — in at least four subcamps at Guantánamo. But the systems automatically recorded over older material when they reached capacity, he wrote.

In some cases, Admiral Buzby wrote, “We suspect that the recording devices contain recorded data but we are unable technologically to confirm whether data remains.”

Combatants may get phone link to home

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — ET, the extra terrestrial, tried to do it. Now the Pentagon has decided to let ECs, or enemy combatants, do it too — phone home.

Army Lt. Col. Edward M. Bush said Tuesday that the Department of Defense has approved a policy to let at least some of the 275 or so war-on-terror detainees here speak by telephone with family.

How? They’re working on it.

”I have no projected timeline for implementation but it is currently being developed,” said Bush, a detention center spokesman.

Approval of the idea comes two months after the International Committee of the Red Cross launched a pilot program in Kabul, Afghanistan, that lets Afghan families to speak by a teleconference video with select U.S.-held captives in the Bagram Air Base, a U.S.-run lockup.

No such single site could be set up to speak with detainees held as ”enemy combatants” here. Their families are spread across far-flung nations from Canada and China to Sudan and Yemen.

On paper, the policy would permit at least certain detainees twice-a-year phone calls.

”Obviously, anything that mitigates the crushing isolation these men have experienced for more than six years is welcome news,” said Illinois law school professor Marc Falkoff, who has for years handled unlawful detention suits on behalf of about a dozen Yemeni detainees.

But he was skeptical about the initial announcement. He suggested it might be a publicity stunt ahead of a coming U.S. Supreme Court decision on detainee rights meant to portray the prison camps in a better light.

”One phone call twice a year hardly makes Gitmo the model of a humane prison,” Falkoff said. “One of my clients has a 6-year-old daughter who he’s never seen or spoken to. She was born while he was in Guantánamo. To be honest, I don’t know whether speaking with her will lift him from his depression or simply shatter him.”

Red Cross delegates have for years had access to detainees at this remote U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba and acted as couriers for letters between the captives and their families. First, detainees must submit their letters to U.S. military censors, who have blackened out such details as allegations of their treatment and descriptions of the sprawling prison camp complex on the Caribbean.

Past prison camps commanders have said that both logistics and security concerns would complicate telephone calls; they would require foreign language interpreters listening in to make sure detainees don’t divulge sensitive information.

U.S. commanders here have already permitted a limited number of so-called “humanitarian phone calls.”

In one case, the U.S. military approved a Guantánamo-Algeria call for a detainee to speak with his mother after learning that his father, an Algiers attorney, had suddenly died of a heart attack.

Under that scheme, the mother was asked to go to the U.S. Embassy in Algiers for the call.

There was no immediate word on whether alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed — on the short list for a death penalty prosecution — would qualify for a phone call.

He has yet to see a lawyer and is held among 15 so-called high-value detainees in segregation at a site called Camp 7, run by a special unit called Task Force Platinum

Cheney may have leaked secret video in Gitmo case

Lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr have alleged that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office leaked a secret video of Khadr in Afghanistan to CBS’ 60 Minutes after a judge denied a prosecution request to play the video in court. Former Gitmo chief prosecutor Col. Morris Davis told Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler — Khadr’s lawyer — that Cheney’s office may have been involved. Kuebler said that if proven, the leak is a “clear violation of the protective orders that are in place” in the case.