[Itpolicy-np] Fwd: Gunmen Used Technology as A Tactical Tool

[Bipin Gautam]

More on the news, how did indian government FAILED...

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"Where in the rule book does it say that terrorists are not allowed to
use technology that is readily available to almost anyone?" said Ajay
Sahni, executive director of New Delhi's Institute for Conflict
Management. "The only people out of the loop seem to be the Indian
security forces. They are a generation behind in understanding the
technology that the terrorists used."  The security forces on the
ground, including the country's elite special forces unit popularly
known as the Black Cats, had little access to night-vision goggles or
thermal-imaging capability to help pinpoint where people were located
in the two hotels under siege, he said. The elite 7,400-member
National Security Guard -- whose commandos arrived in Mumbai at least
eight hours after the attackers struck to dislodge them from the
hotels -- does not have its own aircraft, Sahni said.  "When they
finally got there, they had no floor layouts of the hotel, let alone
high-tech devices,"

COMMENT:  Indian police and anti-terror forces lacked planning,
training,. equipment and the sophistication needed to effectively
counter the terrorists even though forewarned of the attack by the
U.S. government.  And too idiotically proud to accept the aid offered
early on by the Israelis whose anti-terror commandos are among the top
forces in the world of combating terror. Not to mention inept at even
conducting a thorough sweep of the attack sites so the large bomb at
the train station (see article excerpt at end) remained a threat to
many thousands of rail passengers there until yesterday.  The Indian
government has a LONG way to go before its anti-terror program even
gets to be average...an astounding, criminally negligent, situation;
given that India highly vulnerable to terror attacks, suffers several
each year and some, like this one, appear to have the direct or
indirect sponsorship of the intelligence service of a hostile nation.

David Bier

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/02/AR2008120203519_pf.html

Gunmen Used Technology as A Tactical Tool
Mumbai Attackers Had GPS Units, Satellite Maps

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 3, 2008; A01

NEW DELHI, Dec. 2 -- The heavily armed attackers who set out for
Mumbai by sea last week 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 gunmen, 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 that
killed at least 174 people and wounded more than 300. The flood of
information about the attacks -- on TV, cellphones, the Internet --
seized the attention of a terrified city, but it also was exploited by
the assailants to direct their fire and cover their origins.

"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,"
said G. Parthasarathy, an internal security expert at the Center for
Policy Research in New Delhi. "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."

During the attacks, an organization calling itself Deccan Mujaheddin
asserted responsibility in an

e-mail to news outlets that was traced to a computer server in Moscow,
said Praveen Swami, a terrorism expert and media commentator. The
message, it was later discovered, originated in Lahore, Pakistan.
Investigators have said the

e-mail was produced using Urdu-language voice-recognition software to
"anonymatize" regional spellings and accents so police would be unable
to identify their ethnic or geographic origins.

When the gunmen communicated with their leaders, they used satellite
telephones and called voice-over-Internet-protocol phone numbers,
making them harder to trace, Swami said. Then, once on the scene, they
snatched cellphones from hostages and used those to stay in contact
with one another.

At every point, Swami said, the gunmen used technology to gain a
tactical advantage.

"This was technologically a pretty sophisticated group. They navigated
their way to Mumbai using a state-of-the-art GPS system. Most of their
rehearsals to familiarize themselves with Mumbai were done on
high-resolution satellite maps, so they would have a good feel for the
city's streets and buildings where they were going," Swami said,
adding that the CDs containing maps and videos were found in some of
the hotel rooms the gunmen had occupied during the siege.

The lone captured gunman, Azam Amir Kasab, told police that 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.

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

But several Indian analysts pointed out that the country's police are
still equipped with World War II-era rifles, lagging behind the
technology curve when it comes to cyber-criminals and Internet-savvy
gunmen. And although there are closed-circuit TVs in the luxury
hotels, some office buildings, banks, airports and rail stations, they
are not nearly as pervasive as in the United States. There has been
criticism that, like metal detectors, many closed-circuit cameras
don't work or go unmonitored.

Security experts also say the attacks represented an alarm bell for
India's intelligence agencies, which in the past have complained that
Google Earth images contained too much detail about military sites and
other defense installations.

"Where in the rule book does it say that terrorists are not allowed to
use technology that is readily available to almost anyone?" said Ajay
Sahni, executive director of New Delhi's Institute for Conflict
Management. "The only people out of the loop seem to be the Indian
security forces. They are a generation behind in understanding the
technology that the terrorists used."

The security forces on the ground, including the country's elite
special forces unit popularly known as the Black Cats, had little
access to night-vision goggles or thermal-imaging capability to help
pinpoint where people were located in the two hotels under siege, he
said. The elite 7,400-member National Security Guard -- whose
commandos arrived in Mumbai at least eight hours after the attackers
struck to dislodge them from the hotels -- does not have its own
aircraft, Sahni said.

"When they finally got there, they had no floor layouts of the hotel,
let alone high-tech devices," he added.

Investigators and eyewitnesses have reported that the assailants had
TVs on, tuned to live broadcasts of the assault, as the commandos
prepared to storm the hotels.

When TV stations showed every twist and turn of the masked Black Cat
commandos sliding down ropes from helicopters to rooftops near a
Jewish center called the Chabad House, the Mumbai government shut down
news channels, taking live coverage off the air for 45 minutes,
fearing that the attackers were monitoring the screens, ruining the
commandos' crucial element of surprise.

Several TV stations, including the national news station Times Now,
told their anchors to stop reporting on the positions of commandos.
"The fact is, there was a live encounter going on," said Arnab
Goswami, chief editor of Times Now. "If there was even a slight
possibility that these terrorists could use television to get
play-by-play news of the enemy, then we have to stand down. There
should not be a scoop mentality when the nation is on the edge."

When the coverage was cut, residents panicked. Goswami said he
received a thousand text messages within that period to get the news
back on the air, forcing him to decide whether providing information
to the public would jeopardize the lives of the security forces.

"I was immediately on the phone speaking to a lot of senior
politicians in Delhi. The public needed it put back on. But we also
had to be restrained," Goswami said, adding that his station refused
to show photographs of bodies being brought out at captured sites,
which could have boosted the morale of the attackers. He will
participate in a summit of television stations Thursday to study their
role in the crisis.

The Mumbai attacks also lit up the blogosphere, and Web sites such as
YouTube and Twitter kept the data going without interruptions or
blackouts. Some of the young backpackers living near the Chabad House,
also known as Nariman House, said they used Twitter to send
minute-by-minute updates of what was happening to relatives and
friends. Across the globe, in Brooklyn, N.Y., some Hasidic Jews used
Twitter to track the fate of a rabbi held hostage in the building.

For residents of Mumbai, TV coverage was riveting. Madhuri Raghuveer
said her family could not get enough of it. "We practically felt like
TV was our air. We couldn't breathe without it," she said. "But it
also terrified us." They watched the siege as a family. Raghuveer's
son, 6, and daughter, 9, were told to stay inside, where they tended
to gravitate toward the images constantly flickering on the screen.

On Sunday, Raghuveer took them to see the Oberoi Trident hotel, site
of one of the attacks, to show them the siege was over. Outside the
hotel, the windows of a Jimmy Choo shoe store were pierced with bullet
holes. But work crews had begun to tape up the cracked glass. "I
wanted to show them that now everything is safe," she said, pulling
her pigtailed daughter to her side. "They have been sleeping in our
bed since this happened. They say, 'Mama, I can't go to the bathroom
without you. I am afraid.' "

Days later, with Indian news stations repeatedly replaying scenes from
the attacks, her husband, who goes by the initials H.R., cut off the
cable. He said it just got to be too much.

ADDITIONAL RELATED STORIES:

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=6375587

Indian Terrorists Planted Five Bombs and Used Sophisticated Timers to
Detonate Them

The Explosive Material Is Said to Resemble That Used in the 1993 Mumbai Blasts

BY AMMU KANNAMPILLY

MUMBAI, India, Dec. 2, 2008 —

The Mumbai Police Bomb Squad confirmed today that terrorists planted a
total of five bombs in the city during Wednesday's attacks, and that
at least two of the bombs used sophisticated timers unlike anything
India had seen until this year.  Two of the bombs exploded Wednesday
night in taxis in the north Mumbai suburb of Vile Parle and on the
Mazgaon Dockyard Road in south Mumbai. The other three bombs were laid
out at the entrance to the Oberoi Trident Hotel, and near the front
and back entrances of the historic, now ravaged Taj Mahal Palace
Hotel... both bombs contained sophisticated PDT timers -- programmable
electronic timer-delay devices. "Earlier bombs used in India contained
mechanical, clock-type timers," Gawade said. "These timers are very
advanced. You can effectively delay a bomb exploding for any length of
time between eight minutes to six months."

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=6379999

Leftover Explosives Found in Mumbai Train Station

Explosives leftover from Mumbai attacks found in stricken train station

By JEREMIAH MARQUEZ Associated Press Writer
NEW DELHI December 3, 2008 (AP)

Police on Wednesday discovered leftover explosives hidden in a bag in
Mumbai's main train station — a stunning new example of botched
security after the deadly rampage that left the government open to
accusations it missed warnings and bungled its response...The
suspected militants sprayed Chhatrapati Shivaji train station with
gunfire last Wednesday night, but authorities reopened it and declared
it safe Thursday morning. The crowds of commuters quickly returned the
station, one of the country's busiest, and it has been serving
millions of passengers in the days since."