-5- The consequences of 9/11
5.1 “It was bin Laden”

Just eight hours after the WTC attacks, US officials claimed it was bin Laden. (see 4.1, 4.p.m.)
The first “hard” evidence was a video released in December after the WTC attacks. It shows Osama Bin Laden who claims to be responsible for 9/11. He is talking about the damage done to the WTC and names nine pilots who were verified to have been on those planes.
“”I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only,” he said, according to a U.S. government translation.” – CNN. The video which is available to the public shows him smiling and generally happy about what had happened.32
As Ari Fleischer says, that the video is nothing new to the president, because Bush already knew that bin Laden was responsible for the attacks.
“Another discovered videotape is “one more piece of evidence” that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks on Washington and New York, Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday (9th December 2001, CNN). Hence bin Laden has his origin in Afghanistan, it was clear that war with the Taliban regime, that gives asylum to bin Laden, was imminent. Bin Laden was condemned too fast, and then had been setup as a scapegoat. Based on those two videotapes, Bush launched a war against Afghanistan, which already was his first step in the “war on terrorism”.33

5.2 War in Afghanistan

On September 12th, 2001 President George W. Bush announced “he will make no distinction between the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks and those who harbour them.”
Roughly a month later, after the Taliban regime had refused to turn over Osama bin Laden to the US, the British and American military started the bombing of several targets in Afghanistan.
The fighting continued until the end of November and Taliban forces are pushed back. It wasthen decided that an interim administration should govern Afghanistan for six months.
On December the 22nd, the Pashtun leader, Hamid Karzai, became the head of Afghanistan’s new “broad-based government”.
Until the date of writing, the coursework there were continuous small fights around several cities showing that the Taliban forces have not yet been 100%ly eliminated. Also, just in time for the US election in 2004, the hunt for the world’s most wanted criminal34 mastermind continues. Yet he has not been seized, which shows that the Bush administration has either lost interest in bin Laden or is not capable of capturing him and fully destroying his network – Al-Qaida.

5.3 Patriot Act

Patriot Act is the short title for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001″.
The senate welcomed this law by 98 to 1 votes. I am not going to talk about the Patriot Act here in details, as it is written on 342 pages cross-referring to other laws, bills and acts released over the past 200 years in America.35 The Patriot Act allows the law enforcement to use any surveillance methods they wish (may that be bugging the telephone, questioning other people, intercepting mail, reading email, planting Trojan virus devices in pc, etc.), also no permission from court is needed anymore.
If law enforcement decides it is necessary to either use surveillance or do a raid, they can use their new “instant special Patriot Act permissions”.
Due to the Patriot Act, any data accessible to the law enforcement can and may be used to check your background. For example, the law enforcement now has information about what books you read, how frequently you visit the doctor, what medicine you buy, what goods you buy in the supermarket (via your credit card) and so on. Most of the libraries and doctors offices have those special new notes (saying that under the Patriot Act law enforcement is allowed to look at your data) printed in small letters under their usual information. This newly invented Patriot Act is a violation to the independent way of life36, which America once was famous for. With this act being active, the rights of every citizen are restricted to a minimum, as you have to watch out what you do and when you do it.So many experts consider it a joke to call the website informing about the Patriot Act “www.lifeandliberty.gov”.

5.4 Homeland security (Act of 2002)

The Homeland security Act is similar to the Patriot Act, but enhances more the military the law as mentioned in 5.3.
The act, which is accessible at http://thomas.loc.gov describes the procedure and acts that will take place after a certain event, e.g. a nuclear / biological war.
The Homeland security act was also released to justify the big increase in military and border control spending in the years 2002. The website www.dhs.gov (made by the homeland security task force, which was created after the release of the bill) informs about this act and show a “thread advisory”, a newly developed mark by the homeland security task force on their website. This mark shows the current level of “danger and possible terrorist activity” in the US. Another creation of the newly created task force is the site www.ready.gov , which gives information on possible dangerous and hazardous situation in the US. For example, it tells the citizens what to do in the case of a nuclear blast, etc.

5.5 “Osama bin Forgotten”

At some point the Bush administration stopped chasing the most wanted criminal of the world and decided to target another person to blame. This person became Saddam Hussein, former leader of the Iraq. (Based on “The Administration’s attention shifted to building support for the war in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein seemed to replace bin Laden in the role of the world’s most notorious “evildoer.” Indeed, Bush’s reticence on the subject of bin Laden grew so conspicuous that critics, such as the Democratic Presidential candidate Bob Graham, began referring to the terrorist as “Osama bin Forgotten.”")37

5.6 “Weapons of Mass distraction (WMD)”

To justify a war against Iraq, the Bush administration came up with a great story: At first they used the argument that Saddam Hussein was affiliated to the 9/11 attacks, then they kept on saying that the Iraq would maintain Weapons of Mass destruction. Due to the fact that most of the news companies, such as CNN, CBS, Fox and others are depended on the White House and their information (it’s simple as this: if you don’t publish what they want you to, you are no longer invited to the White House press briefings), they kept on repeating the fake story about WMD. Head inspector Blix said in his report released to the UN and accessible to the White House, that there were no WMD at all.38
Just to name some more cases where fake evidence was used to justify an action wanted to be undone today: Guatemala, Cuba, El Salvador and Gulf War I / Kuwait. The U.S. has a long history of fabricating evidence to justify foreign adventures.
Thus, you can say that the Bush administration used the Weapons of Mass destruction as Weapons of Mass distraction. To quote the LA times:
“Yet the crucial point is that, so far, none of Miller’s big WMD exclusives has proved to be true — nobody’s found nuthin’ — and she increasingly looks like a Pentagon flack who helped sell the war. By comparison, Blair’s inaccurate description of a suburban driveway and Bragg’s sub-Faulknerian maundering about Gulf Coast oystermen feel positively benign. Where these guys were simply promoting themselves, Miller’s work looks suspiciously like Bush administration propaganda.”39
It’s funny to see how the Bush administration contradicts themselves; in January 2001 and June 2001, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, said on TV, that the Iraq has no WMD, and is not a thread at all.40 Then in late 2002 and early 2003 they say the complete opposite, despite Blix’s report. Seeing as until today no one has found any WMD in or near Iraq, someone must have lied.

Read on | The consequences of 9/11

Ever since I owned the ICQ number 108039 I have been getting spam messages from all kinds of russians, turkish and eastern europeans. Since the ICQ UIN (Universal Internet Number) is one of the first numbers that was registered, it has become quite rare.
ICQ was developed in 1996 by Mirabilis. The company was founded by four young Israelis: Yair Goldfinger, Arik Vardi, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir. After AOL bought it, it was managed by Ariel Yarnitsky and Avi Shechter.

Mirabilis (ICQ) started to give away ICQ # starting at 10000 so basically this is the 8039th number.

Anyway, I registered this PC when I was waiting for my dad in the office. I have always been interested in the Internet and always been reading stuff on the internet. Back then ICQ was announced in some news and I was so curious about this “new way of chatting” (before I was only using IRC - Internet Relay Chat) that I signed up.
Back then I didn’t have my own domain, not to dream of server or web space, so I was using a freemail service such as yahoo. Account registered, details entered (birthday, Nationality, Languages spoken, About etc) and then for long time (after some non-frequent use) nothing happened. ICQ kind of became unpopular for me, since all my friends were using IRC and no one could be bothered to sign up. So I kind of binned it, leaving the details “saved” on my (well actually this is quite important: it was not my PC, but my father’s companies one!) PC.

After two or three years, I can not really remember I started to use ICQ again, but I wasn’t really aware of my old account and thus registered a new one which I was from then on using more frequently to chat with my friends abroad. This was even long before anyone at school or in my class even knew ICQ as a chat tool, so much for the gap of internet knowledge at early times (not meant to glorify my internet use!).

Here is where it gets interesting, I think it was more a chain of coincidences, that lead me to my old ICQ account 108039: My father changed companies and brought home this particular PC (which I was using before, but then was given back to the office clerk, then back to my father for home use and so on.. back then (again) it was not very usual to format PCs every few weeks and forth)) and asked me whether I’d use it as a new router for our newly established DSL broadband internet access.

Since I didn’t have that much to do (contrary to today), I agreed to spend some time looking into things, googling for one-disk linux routers. But before I formatted thee ol’ mill, I had to look through files that had to be backup’ed. Under C:\Program Files\ I found something interesting which raised my attention. A folder called ICQ. Wow! I had discovered my old account! But I couldn’t login, since the PC was not connected to the Internet. So I had to go to the local PC store, get a compatible Ethernet card (one with a BNC clip - ugh) and set it up to connect to the net. Some hours later I was able to login using the saved password! And it worked! It worked out of the box like a charm!. You cannot imagine how happy and surprised I was to find all my old contact in place, people that I didn’t speak with for years.

But another problem occurred, I didn’t know the password but wanted to use the account from my own PC upstairs. After some research a found different programs that were able to unmask the stars and showed the password. The password I had it set was so stupid:
JAyJAy0208.
I used a program similar to the one I am using nowerdays, it is called SIW. See the information below (also links to download it).

SIW is a System Information tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings. [...] SIW also displays currently active network connections, Passwords hidden behind asterisks [...] A standalone tool that does not require installation.

Get it at author’s website | direct download (exe) | torrent download | mirror (exe)

Anyway, I was using my new ‘old’ account on my desktop PC and decided to change the password to one that I was using for other services such as e-mail, bouncer etc.
It was lowercase letters and 6 digets only and contrary to the password I had used when I signed up (read above), JAyJAy0208 had a change of uppercase and lowercase as well as numbers.
In terms of security the old password was stronger then the one I selected.

This is, at least so I think, what lead to the loss of my account, from one day to the next I was unable to login anymore. At first it was some kind of issue with Trillian or the ICQ service in general, but since the error code was remaining the same (Wrong Password) for days I assumed there was something wrong with my account. Of course official e-mail to ICQ didn’t receive a reply, post in the forums where ignored or deleted and in general no one felt like helping. After some time I figured out that my account could have probably been hacked, because I was not even able to get to the security question which could be used to reset my password. Also most of my personal information was deleted from the account profile. The only things left were my date of birth, my nationality and my spoken languages. My name, e-mail address and nickname were erased.

I started to research things, and googled for sites where you could buy UINs on, here are two exemplary excerpts:

It seemed like as if people were willing to pay great amounts of $ for low diget ICQ account, such as mine (108039). I checked many sites, russian sites, turkish sites, czech sites, german sites and asian sites, to no success. So I started to add so called “UIN dealers or Shop owners” and asked them to acquire the UIN 108039 for me (I used another account and said I wanted this ICQ number badly and was willing to pay, just to check whether it was available from a pool of hacked icq numbers or not), but no one was able to get it.
So where was my ICQ number? Who owned it, or hacked it? Was it a database error or mistake by ICQ?
Obviously the account was not deleted because of inactivity because ELSE I could not have logged in initially and changed the password and then again used it for weeks before the loss occurred.

I was running out of ideas and started to accept the “loss”, I began to re-add the folks of my old contact list to my new account and let grass cover the hole for some days. I was then approached by some russian dude, who had read my post on the ICQ forums. He said that he was experiencing the same symptoms, and that he had gotten a contact to some ICQ admin (I am not allowed to write here, I promised) and that he was willing to share that with me for $5 to be transfered to him via western union. Quite promising I thought, also because he had sent me an e-mail log (conversation) with this particular admin and he seemed quite cool and helpful. Thus I decided to take the risk and pay the five bucks. I received the contact the day after, added the person and told him my story in short. I knew that this admin wouldn’t have loads of time and was also worried of his contact given around like a stray dog, so I summed things up, explained how I got the contact and my situation, said that I could proof that I was the legal owner of this ICQ account and so on. This admin was not working in the security/account department , so he couldn’t promise anything, and of course he had 100s of better things to do then to help out some random dude from the internet. But he was so kind to ask his mate who’d worked in the security department if he wanted to look at things. He told me that I had to convince this admin with good proof and reasons that I am the owner and not some scammer wanting to make some quick bucks!

So I scanned in my Identity Card, my driving licsence and my travel passport and sent it to his e-mail address. He printed it out and went with these documents to his friend in the lunchbreak, and the next thing I remember is that I received an e-mail from ICQ three hours later, saying that my primary e-mail address had been reset, to enter all new security questions and with a brand new password with lowercase, uppercase, digets and special characters. I logged in using this password and it worked like a charm! wow, amazing! I am so thankful, still.
The password is similar to this (of course this is not my password, duh): s&Bo$7i!

If there is anything, ever, that I can do to repay you guys, in case you read this, I will do my best to sort things out.

* As a response to increasing UIN theft of attractive or very short UINs by hackers, ICQ started to store email addresses previously associated to a UIN. UINs that are stolen with phishing or brute force techniques can since then be retaken by their rightful owners using the password retrieval service on ICQ.com, even after the associated primary email address has been changed or replaced by the hacker. This only applies if a valid primary email address has been entered into the user profile since 1999.

further reading (not encouraged actually)

That article does not contain the full and detailed description of system - at present it is impossible. We shall consider only general moments.

It is obvious, that it is necessary for usual users ICQ only with the maximal attention and severity to observe all rules of ICQ-security, to keep number ICQ, since to hope for changeable system of restoration ICQ it is practically useless.

Read on | How I got my 6-diget ICQ account back in 2005