Two hundred two people died in the Bali, Indonesia, disco bombing of October 12, 2002, when a suicide bomber blew himself up on a tourist-bar dance floor, and then, moments later, a second bomber detonated an explosives-filled Mitsubishi van parked outside. Now, the mastermind of the attacks -- Imam Samudra, a 35-year-old Islamist militant with links to al-­Qaeda -- has written a jailhouse memoir that offers a primer on the more sophisticated crime of online credit card fraud, which it promotes as a way for Muslim radicals to fund their activities.

Law enforcement authorities say evidence collected from Samudra's laptop computer shows he tried to finance the Bali bombing by committing acts of fraud over the Internet. And his new writings suggest that online fraud -- which in 2003 cost credit card companies and banks $1.2 billion in the United States alone -- might become a key weapon in terrorist arsenals, if it's not already. "We know that terrorist groups throughout the world have financed themselves through crime," says Richard Clarke, the former U.S. counterterrorism czar for President Bush and President Clinton. "There is beginning to be a reason to conclude that one of the ways they are financing themselves is through cyber-crime."