Cracking bin Laden's computer code: unlikely

It has been reported that Osama bin Laden's hard drives have been seized, hard drives that could conceivably contain information regarding the membership, funding and future plans of al-Qaeda. Information of this type would help anti-terrorism agencies enormously. The hard drives were recovered from bin Laden's compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and are said to be encrypted with a encryption method known as AES-256. AES-256 is the current world standard for data encryption and is used by the likes of Wikileaks and the US Government to encrypt sensitive information.