Watch your mouth, now
Arrests key win for NSA hackers
By DAVID AKIN
Globe and Mail Update
POSTED AT 8:03 AM EDT Tuesday, Apr. 6, 2004
…Citing anonymous sources in the British intelligence community, The Sunday Times reported that an e-mail message intercepted by NSA spies precipitated a massive investigation by intelligence officials in several countries that culminated in the arrest of nine men in Britain and one in suburban Orleans, Ont. -- 24-year-old software developer Mohammed Momin Khawaja, who has since been charged with facilitating a terrorist act and being part of a terrorist group.
The Orleans arrest is considered an operational milestone for this vast electronic eavesdropping network and its operators. But Dave Farber, an Internet pioneer and computer-science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said the circumstances are also notable because it will be the first time that routine U.S. monitoring of e-mail traffic has led to an arrest.
"That's the first admission I've actually seen that they actually monitor Internet traffic. I assumed they did, but no one ever admitted it," Mr. Farber said.
