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Timeri N. Murari

IT IS not easy being a terrorist nowadays, especially if you are going to be hunted down. In the good old days, you committed your deed, shooting or bombing, and you could vanish without a trace. Life was simpler in those old days. If you wanted to send a ransom note or a threatening note, you clipped out letters from a newspaper, stuck them on a sheet of paper and posted it. You did not put a return address on it. The cops would then go crazy dusting the note for fingerprints and minutely examining the stamp, hoping for clues. You could mail bombs or even anthrax (what has happened there?) and no one would know where you were located. Or, if you wanted to make your usual threatening phone call, you knew it took the cops at least five or six minutes to track your location, if they had a tap on the line. That was in the US, where the equipment was hi-tech back then. In India, where the phones have never worked, it probably would take a few hours or days to trace a call. That is, if your phone is working. Mine is very sickly and any terrorist would give up trying to reach me.

Of course, I am going on what I have seen in the movies. The cops told the victim-to-be to `keep talking', while we saw shots of men frantically tracking the clicks and clacks in the telephone exchange. Later, we would be shown a computer screen and red lines racing through networks to track that call.

By the time they found the location, a telephone booth, the phone would be dangling down.

Today, the terrorist has the Internet and e-mail to communicate with his bosses, wherever they are in the world. He strolls into an anonymous Internet café, sends his e-mail or gets his orders and he is out of there.

Probably, he thought no one could trace his messages once he had hit the `delete' button. You may remember, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, that the poor girl thought that deleting messages meant totally erasing them. Unfortunately for her, computers do not exactly delete anything. They just tuck them away somewhere or the other to fool you into thinking you have deleted them. All Monica's e-mails were dug out of the computer and read.

I have just been reading about the `shoe bomber', Richard Reid. He used a Paris Internet café to `talk' to his leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The cops raided it and removed all the hard disks so they could read what he had written and received and from where. Computers are sneaky technical machines, and a good friend of mine quite rightly distrusts them. They talk to each other behind their screens, without you knowing, sending `cookies' back and forth which infiltrate your machine. Or, if you are unlucky, some smart 12-year-old has hacked into your computer, read all your secret mail, and then planted a virus.

Terrorists are also given to using cell phones. It is a wonderful invention and most modern-day, go-getting people constantly remark they cannot live without these gadgets. I have to admit, if you are a very busy, important person like a terrorist on the move constantly, a cell phone is the best way to keep in touch with your pals. You can be in the middle of a hijack or a bombing, and you can chat to your boss, wherever he is, giving him an up-to-the-minute report on your dark deeds.

However, the problem here, as many terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, have discovered, is that you can be tapped and tracked very easily. It does not take the cops five minutes to find out where you are; it takes seconds before a missile comes homing in on you. Apart from that, you end up with a detailed billing that shows whom you called, who called you and how many minutes you spoke. Even the ordinary telephone today, with the line identification gadget, can give you the caller's phone number in a second or less.

Do terrorists have high IQs? Are they in the 140/150-bracket, real geniuses? I am sure they could not have any IQ worth noting. They operate at a very low level of intelligence. They have used hi-tech without realising that it is all about Big Brother watching you. Governments, co-operating, can keep track and trace and control all our movements today, whether you are in the terror business or not. You cannot phone, cell phone, fax or e-mail without leaving a trace of yourself behind for them to follow. Even if you use codes, a high-speed computer can crack any code within minutes. So, it will have to be back to the postal system or the pigeon carrier for terrorists. Probably, they are more reliable, though very much slower.

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