careless talkThe New York Sun’s Eli Lake is reporting this morning that al-Qaeda’s intranet communications system has been shut down - or more likely moved - following an report by ABC News that revealed the fact that American intelligence had penetrated and was monitoring their communications.

The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden’s first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the morning of September 7, the Web site of ABC News posted excerpts from the speech.

But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda’s internal security division that the organization’s Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. This network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda’s production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.

And so the battle rages on with our enemies from without who received invaluable assistance from our enemies from within ….

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.”

The founder of a Web site known as clandestineradio.com, Nick Grace, tracked the shutdown of Qaeda’s Obelisk system in real time. “It was both unprecedented and chilling from the perspective of a Web techie. The discipline and coordination to take the entire system down involving multiple Web servers, hundreds of user names and passwords, is an astounding feat, especially that it was done within minutes,” Mr. Grace said yesterday.

The fact that they can shut down and move that widespread a system in a matter of moments is phenomenal. It tells us that both them and their system is sophisticated and well organized.

Years of work to infiltrate the al-Qaeda intranet system was flushed down the drain for the sake of a story. Someone, somewhere leaked the story to ABC and ABC published it. Its being investigated where the leak came from, they know who it went to. ABC probably was really proud of themselves for getting a scoop on that story.

h/t Newsbusters