From May 2003:

] Court documents from the ongoing Milan trial, cited by
] the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, say that police
] discovered images of the World Trade Center along with
] numerous files that contained images downloaded from the
] Internet of political leaders such as President Bush,
] Secretary of State Colin Powell and Palestinian leader
] Yasser Arafat, as well as large quantities of
] pornographic material, also taken from the Internet.
]
] The images, investigators said, had been manipulated
] -- their colors modified -- before being sent
] back onto the Web.

This is a story I'm still following. There are plenty of articles out there that trumpet "Al Qaeda Using Steganography to Encode Messages in Porn", but no proof. Everything I've found about this Milan trial tends to lead back to a single article in the "Corriere della Sera" newspaper, an Italian daily.

My own gut feeling is still, "Sometimes porn is just porn", but I'd still be interested in seeing trial transcripts if I could just figure out how to get my hands on them...

More Steganography / Al Qaeda Rumors