Re: CLIPPER COMPROMIZED!!!! :-)

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

I think David Koontz has hit the nail on the head:

(quoting Bill Stewart)

> >which must *obviously* be true because it came off the *wire services*...
> >Probably Aldrich Ames didn't have any contact with the people in the
> >NSA doing Clipper or the FBI people doing Digital Telephony Prevention.
> 
> Ames may have had access to the rationale Dot and an un-named white
> house source were quoted to effect ' ..if you knew what I know, you
> would understand the need' (in effect tying Clipper to national security).
> 
> Were he to compromise how good the interception is IN THIS COUNTRY to
> a foreign powers intelligence service, for instance,  it might severly
> change their way of doing communications in the U.S.  (the target country).

As a senior person involved in counterintelligence for the CIA, Ames
almost certainly had access to the "sources and methods" used to try
to locate moles within the intelligence agencies, etc. Telephone
surveillance, for example. 

It would not surprise me one bit to eventually hear that Ames was in
contact with the working group putting together the Digital Telephony
program of a few years back, and the current proposal. That Clipper
was developed by the NSA does not mean that the CIA, DIA, FBI, FinCEN,
and other agencies were not involved in it.

If Dorothy Denning received briefings on Clipper (recall my "A Trial
Balloon to Ban Encryption?" thread started in October, 1992--6 months
before Clipper was announced), and if John Markoff and others knew of
it in advance, why would it be surprising that senior officials in the
CIA were also aware of the "needs" and the "plans" and were passing
them on to their handlers in Moscow?

Part of the sensitive information Ames likely had was the number of
wiretaps of suspected spies! (Remember his job.) Though this is not
cited as part of the "official wiretaps" (the Denning/Freeh
statistics), this is certainly valuable infromation for the Russians
or for any other entity conducting espionage. My hunch is that Aldrich
Ames had access to those numbers and now the worry is that they were
amongst the many things he passed on to the Russians.

Maybe he wasn't actually in on the planning of Digital Telephony and
Clipper, but he probably knew more about these programs and their
justifications (in the eyes of the intelligence community) than the
public knows.


--Tim May


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