Post #247
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Tell us everything! Well, not quite everything…
21st February 2004, the wee hours | Comments (27)
Now here’s an odd thing: if you’re a terrorist with an overwhelming urge to confess, or you’re the friend of a terrorist and you’re thinking of cashing him in, the CIA have thoughtfully provided a web-based form where you can spill your guts.
The form, complete with handy further reading, has one odd feature though, and it’s odd for two reasons.
Part of their instructions read: The size of your submission may not exceed 25,000 bytes.
Now, not only is that dumb in terms of user-friendliness (I don’t know how much information 25,000 bytes is), but, what the hell are they doing limiting the amount of information they want to receive?
- Bearded fiend
- Hi, my name is Osama Bin Laden, you may remember hunting me in such countries as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I run the World’s largest terrorist network and in a sudden change of heart I wish to tell you everything about my evil schemes… (24,653 bytes later) …but enough background, let me tell you my operatives’ names, their plans, and how you can stop them…
- CIA
- Whoa, whoa, whoa, Buddy! Can’t you read? It’s 25,000 bytes only! You had your chance and you blew it, now take a hike… come on, move along there… Okay, who’s next? Well make it snappy — no amusing childhood stories, no wretched hand-wringing, and enough with the ‘George Bush Center for Intelligence’ jokes; we’ve heard them already.
Very odd.
The Bearded Fiend
As a point of interest, I just Googled “where is osama bin laden”, and while I didn’t get a definitive answer (man, Google sucks, I bet Yahoo know), I did spot one reason why the hunt may have stalled slightly: The FBI and CIA have him listed as “Usama Bin Laden”, while the rest of the World has him down as “Osama Bin Laden”. People, some communication, please.
That said, it’s not surprising that such confusion is rife, he is, after all, a Master of Disguise. His FBI Most Wanted page shows the levels this man will go to to hide his identity. Two of his known aliases are listed as: “Usama Bin Muhammad Bin Ladin”, and “Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin”.
With devilishness like that, I doubt we’ll ever capture him…
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— George W Bush (9)- What WordPress is doing to combat comment spam. (1)
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