In what appears to be a new policy of "openness", the United States government has decided to publish information about cases related to its security. Last week, documents about the assassination of John F. Kennedy were revealed, and the specialized press is still processing them, but today it's Osama bin Laden's turn. The CIA released a total of 321 gigabytes recovered from the operation that ended the terrorist's life in May 2011. A good part of the data belongs to browser cache, but inside the package there appear retro games, anime, and movies.
On May 2, 2011, the so-called Team Six of the Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden under the special operation "Neptune's Spear," which took place on the outskirts of Abbottabad, Pakistan. The procedure required several legal shortcuts whose validity is still being debated (since the United States was not at war with Pakistan), starting with the fact that all military personnel were temporarily transferred to the CIA. Six and a half years later, the intelligence agency published a package with more than 470,000 files recovered from bin Laden's personal computer and other seized devices. The total amounts to 321 gigabytes, and anyone interested can download it, as long as they understand the risk. The CIA combed through the files from end to end, but gives no guarantee of their integrity, and it is possible that there is malware among them.
Now, the question: What did they find? Correspondence between bin Laden and his family, other leaders of Al Qaeda and various agents, plans, information linked to theoretical targets, a lot of propaganda, and an enormous web cache, which is logical if we consider that the terrorist's internet access surely was very limited and sporadic. However, there were also games. Some of the titles mentioned are:
- New Super Mario Bros
- Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
- Yoshi's Island DS
- Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
- Battles of Prince of Persia
- Metroid Prime Hunters
- Naruto Saikyou Ninja Daikesshuu 3
- One Piece - Gear Spirit
... which shows a great interest in the Nintendo DS. Then images of retro titles appear, ranging from Pac-Man to erotic classics like Perestroika Girls, references to Super Nintendo and NeoGeo emulators, and the MAME executable. Finally, we discover a significant number of movies that the CIA did not release due to copyright issues. Antz, Cars, Chicken Little, Final Fantasy VII (I guess they mean Advent Children), and Resident Evil are part of the list.
Those 321 gigabytes serve as a window into the last days of the most wanted man in the world, however, there are details that we cannot ignore. Were the games and movies really bin Laden's? The computer might have been his, but in the Abbottabad bunker there were also five women (one of them was shot) and thirteen children. Personally, I find it hard to imagine bin Laden playing Metroid, but one of his sons? That's another story.
