Qaeda Goes Dark

After ABC News ran a video that the federal government plucked off al Qaeda's Internet communications system, Obelisk, AQ immediately pulled the plug:

One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America's Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda's internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America's intelligence community saw. "We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak," the official said. "We lost an important keyhole into the enemy."

Heartbreaking. In netwar, distributed organizations pose very few centralized targets. Obelisk represented one such target, and now it's gone.
Qaeda Goes Dark After a U.S. Slip - October 9, 2007 - The New York Sun

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