Osama Family's Suspicious Site

For the price of registering a domain name, a 30-year-old Web designer from Los Angeles has bought a bizarre piece of Internet history. On Oct. 27, Christopher Curry's company, Shrimpo.com, purchased a domain name that once belonged to the Saudi Binladin Group, the international construction conglomerate owned by the family of public enemy No. 1, Osama bin Laden. What makes Saudi-binladin-group.com so interesting is not just that it was once an official SBG website, but that it was registered on Sept. 11, 2000, with a pre-set expiration date of Sept. 11, 2001, according to a "whois" search of the Internet domain registry VeriSign. Having the SBG domain registration expire on the day the United States was attacked is "a hell of a coincidence," said Charles Boncelet, a University of Delaware computer and information sciences professor, who is an expert on the field of steganography -- the science of hiding information. Law enforcement is already looking into whether the Sept. 11 attackers used seemingly innocuous websites or e-mails to transmit attack information using data embedded in audio or video files. The FBI will not comment about the SBG website expiration date being used as a signal to attackers -- a signal that would mean the bin Laden family's public disavowal of their notorious 17th son, Osama, was merely a public relations ploy.