Richard Reid/Abdul Ra'uff encryption

[David Howe]

> Apparently the Wall St Journal reporters bought the computers second
> hand, and purely by chance they were full of incriminating al-Qaeda
> information. What a fantastic bit of luck.
Yup - and despite it being "heavily encrypted" there was nothing preventing
them getting in and finding enough plaintext there for them to recognise its
importance and hand it over to the US military - who devoted five sony
playsta^w^wsupercomputers to breaking the Recovery Agent key. What jolly
good luck for a major us newspaper, yes?