It is starting to look like it was Osama bin Laden's techno fear which killed him. His house in a military cantonment town north of the Pakistani capital Islamabad was completely technology free. This was because he was paranoid about being tracked electronically.

However the lack of the basic tools of modern communications in a luxury home was cited by US officials as precisely one of the things that aroused their suspicion that the building was being used to house the al-Qaeda leader. A senior US administration official who requested anonymity said it was "noteworthy" that "the property is valued at approximately $US1 million but has no telephone or internet service connected".

No normal person would own an expensive house in a good region and not have a phone or access to the web. So US intelligence worked out that the bloke who lived there must be a terrorist. They then used every technological gizmo to try and find out who that might be.

What a difference a few years makes. In the 1990s US law enforcement reached the same conclusions about Ted Kaczynski.