Tsarnaev Lawyer Aggressively Questions FBI Computer Expert
BOSTON (CBS) — Last week, jurors in the Boston Marathon bombing case saw dozens of images culled from thousands of pages of anti-U.S and pro-jihadi content. all of it, found on Johar Tsarnaev's computers and hard drives.
On Monday, a counterterrorism expert put many of the puzzle pieces together, explaining how some young people use these writings as the basis for committing violence against Americans.
In his testimony, Dr. Matthew Levitt analyzed Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's infamous boat note - scribbled in pencil and written inside the vessel in which he was hiding - line by line, explaining to jurors how some Tsarnaev's themes and content were similar to passages in, and sometimes near-exact quotes from, al Qaeda-sponsored publications like Inspire Magazine.
Also on Tsarnaev's hard drives were many audio files of various nasheeds, or musical prayers, along with the voice of Sheik Anwar al-Awlaki in which he can be heard encouraging Muslims to bring violence to the west.
FBI agent and computer analyst Kevin Swindon, ending his second day on the stand, also reviewed with jurors a lot of the inflammatory content found on Tsarnaev's laptop, home computer, and thumb drive. One such article talked about how to "make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom."
But under cross examination by defense attorney Bill Fick, Swindon had to admit that the most incriminating content is just a tiny percentage of everything on Tsarnaev's devices.
More important, he testified, it is all but impossible to tell precisely who downloaded what, and when, and why onto devices now identified as belonging to the defendant.
Jurors hears how Tsarnaev's hard drives contain everything from friends' homework assignments to Tamerlan's wife's financial information, suggesting many people had access and time to put whatever they wanted on those devices.