Why bin Laden watched so much porn

You may recall that when President Obama personally led a SEAL team off the helicopters in Pakistan and then looked Osama bin Laden in the eye and said, "Die, raghead!" just as pulled the trigger, we learned that among the many kinds of materials snatched for their intelligence exploitation were thousands (or more) of porn videos and digital images.

Wow, what a loser bin Laden turned out to be! From the head of a worldwide terror network to a middle-aged, solitary porno freak.

Why did bin Laden watch so much porn? As it turns out, there might have been something much more nefarious than cheap thrills: "Al Qaeda suspect's porn film found to contain treasure trove of secret documents."

A suspected member of the Al Qaeda terrorist group, arrested in May last year in Germany, was found with a memory stick hidden in his underwear. Police discovered the stick contained a password-protected folder with pornographic videos inside it, but suspicious computer forensic experts thought there must be more. After weeks of analysis, they determined that one of the pornographic videos contained concealed documents detailing Al Qaeda operations and plans.

The files were hidden in the video file through a process called steganography or concealed writing. The term steganography includes methods used for centuries, such as invisible ink, but now also includes techniques such as concealing (often unencrypted) content inside a digital image, video or audio file. Steganography conceals data within “plain sight,” which makes it difficult to detect.

Digital steganography can be done on audio files by manipulating the waveform to hide data, but such changes produce noise that is more obvious than changes visible to the eye. Data can be hidden in image files opened in a text editor simply by inserting text at the end of the file, but more sophisticated and effective methods use special software to manipulate individual bytes or pixels of the media file.

For example, readily available software can be used to manipulate the properties of individual pixels within an image. The color of pixels is determined by vector values representing the intensity of each color (red, green and blue in RGB systems, for example), and these values can be manipulated to hide data.

So all of bin Laden's porn viewing was really operational planning!