Terrorism in the digital age

The heavily armed terrorists who set out for Mumbai by sea navigated with Global Positioning System equipment...

The heavily armed terrorists who set out for Mumbai by sea navigated with Global Positioning System equipment, according to Indian investigators and police. They carried BlackBerrys, CDs holding high-resolution satellite images like those used for Google Earth maps, and multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track.

They spoke by satellite telephone. And as television channels broadcast live coverage of the young men carrying out the terrorist attack, TV sets were turned on in the hotel rooms occupied by the men, eyewitnesses recalled.

This is terrorism in the digital age. Emerging details about the 60-hour siege of Mumbai suggest the attackers had made sophisticated use of high technology in planning and carrying out the assault.

The flood of information about the attacks 8212; on TV, cellphones, the Internet 8212; seized the attention of a terrified city, but it was also exploited by the terrorists to direct their fire and cover their origins.

8220;Both sides used technology. The terrorists would not have been able to carry out these attacks had it not been for technology.

They were not sailors, but they were able to use sophisticated GPS navigation tools and detailed maps to sail from Karachi in Pakistan to Mumbai,8221; said G Parthasarathy, an internal security expert at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. 8220;Our new reality of modern life is that the public also sent text messages to relatives trapped in hotels and used the Internet to try and fight back.8221;

During the attacks, an organisation calling itself the Deccan Mujaheddin asserted responsibility in an e-mail to news outlets, which was traced to a computer server in Moscow, Russia.

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The message, it was later discovered, originated in Lahore. Investigators have said the e-mail was produced using Urdu-language voice-recognition software to 8220;anonymatise8221; regional spellings and accents so police would be unable to identify their ethnic or geographic origins.

When the terrorists communicated with their leaders, they used satellite telephones and called voice-over-Internet-protocol phone numbers, making them harder to trace.

Then, once on the scene, they snatched cellphones from hostages and used those to stay in contact with one another.

The lone captured terrorist, Ajmal Ameer Kasab, told police he was shown video footage of the targets and the satellite images before the attacks, said Deven Bharti, a Deputy Commissioner in the Crime Branch of the Mumbai police.

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Mumbai police chief Hassan Gafoor, offering the first official details of how the siege was conducted, said at a news conference on Tuesday: 8220;Technology is advancing every day. We try to keep pace with it.8221;