Osama bin Laden Might Have Used Porn to Communicate

There’s a new Osama bin Laden documentary, and it sheds some light on the terrorist’s sizable porn collection.

The fact that such a collection exists isn’t news in and of itself; that revelation was first reported by Reuters back in 2011, with subsequent reports on bin Laden’s stash of pornographic material calling the collection “fairly extensive.” But what Bin Laden’s Hard Drive, National Geographic’s new deep dive into the trove of materials discovered at the terrorist’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, does reveal is new insight into what bin Laden might have been doing with all that porn.

While we might assume bin Laden was simply doing what most people do with porn, Bin Laden’s Hard Drive suggests the al Qaeda leader might have actually used his pornographic materials to communicate in code.

Per the Daily Beast:

According to his letters, bin Laden feared using email as a means of spreading his message, because encryption couldn’t be trusted; this is why most of his interaction with the outside world occurred via couriers. However, the idea is raised by Bergen’s show (directed by Aaron Kunkel) that the al Qaeda bigwig might have been hiding encrypting instructions in his pornographic files—a devious means of avoiding detection by marrying murderous commands to the very sort of sinful content he purportedly decried.

However, as forensic psychologist and CIA consultant Reid Meloy states in the doc, it’s also possible that bin Laden was simply a regular guy who liked to get off to porn from time to time. Ultimately, we may never know what bin Laden did with his massive porn stash, and maybe that’s for the best after all.