Tripoli Was Brought Down By a Caterer With a Bunch of Flash Drives [Libya]

In reporting on the Fall of Tripoli, Reuters tells the inside story of Abdel Majid Mlegta, a caterer who supplied the victuals for Gaddafi's regime. Putting key inside information on a series of memory sticks, this man was instrumental in bringing Gaddafi down.

In the days and weeks that followed the August 20th uprising, rebel forces were able to capture or topple many major operation rooms of Gaddafi's forces. That information was collected by Mlegta, who had built up good relations with his superiors before defecting, and secretly leaked to NATO and rebel leaders on three flash drives. According to Reuters:

After presenting the rebels' plan "from A to Z", Mlegta handed NATO officials three memory cards: the one packed with information about regime strongholds in Tripoli; another with updated information on regime sites as well as details of 65 Gaddafi officers sympathetic to the rebels who had been secretly supplied with NATO radiophones; and a third which contained the plot to take Tripoli.

So confident were they in the revolution, that they didn't even make the plot a secret. That plot would go on to be known as Operation: Mermaid Dawn. And they were ready. Follow Mlegta's story and how it all went down on Reuters.

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Balint Szlanko

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International Tech Companies Helped Gaddafi Spy on Libyans [Libya]

Muammar Gaddafi was a desperate man even before the civil war, and it shows more since the recent fall of Tripoli. The Wall Street Journal reports that Gaddafi had the Libyan people systematically spied upon online for years. And international tech companies helped.

Implicated in the report are tech companies from the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Africa, and all had a hand in Gaddafi's obsession with security by providing phone tapping, internet filtering, and email monitoring technologies. Those companies include Boeing's own Narus, which reportedly looked into adding their own internet filtering products to Libya's established monitoring operation, and Amesys, a French security company that provided Libya with Deep Packet Inspection software back in 2009, and intercepted messages from Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, MSN Messenger, and AIM.

The messages were tracked all the way up to February of this year, shortly before the uprising and when Gaddafi shut down the internet entirely. It's a shame the revolution did happen then. They could have kept on making their money. [WSJ]

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Rich Schultz

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The Tech That Took Out Gadhafi [Libya]

With rebel forces in Tripoli and Moammar Gadhafi on the run, the end could be near for the Libyan civil war. Sporadic fighting continues in the capital city of the oil-rich North African nation, NATO warplanes are still patrolling overhead, and there's always the danger of Gadhafi true-believers launching a fresh insurgency.

But already, Western analysts are weighing the lessons of the six-month-long conflict. "Modern air power is the key force that is directly leading to the overthrow of the Gadhafi regime," retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula concluded.

True, but a host of other cutting-edge technologies, and a few decidedly low-end ones, also played critical roles.

Photo: Mike Elkin

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Wikileaks Releases Thousands More Cables Covering China, Taiwan and Libya [Wikileaks]

Wikileaks just dropped thousands more embassy cables today. These centered around China, Taiwan, and Libya.

The first batch to drop were 2170 cables about Taiwan. Some 3004 cables from China followed quickly behind. And perhaps most interestingly, given the news of the day, they closed out with 349 cables from Libya. While we haven't had a chance to go through these yet, we're betting the Libya timing isn't coincidental.

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