How Tiny Swiss Cellphone Chips Helped Track Global Terror Web (2004)

nytimes.com

10 points·Nrsolis··7 comments

...(2004).

Did they not have SIMs in the US in 2004? The article takes an awful long time to identify these 'chips' explicitly as SIM cards, as if the intended audience wouldn't known about them.

Yes, it was a little strange hearing them be called "subscriber identity module cards" as if that would be more familiar to us.

Depending on your carrier, SIMs weren't really used unless you were with AT&T or T-Mobile. The subsidized phone system here made switching out SIMs between phones kinda pointless so fewer people knew about them.

Now, with LTE, that's changing a bit.

Or if you live in Europe.

Or didn't and lived in Japan.

Sprint and Verizon still don't except in 4G phones, and while IIRC t-mobile always did, AT&T/Cingular switched to them later on, and in 2004 still had a significant 1G network.

"Mr. Mohammed was a victim of his own sloppiness, said a senior European intelligence official. He was meticulous about changing cellphones, but apparently he kept using the same SIM card."

It seems weird that a leader in an organization capable of executing the 9/11 attacks could have lacked such basic understanding of how cellular technology works. There wasn't a single guy in al Qaeda who knew that a SIM card was a unique identifier?

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