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[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

1-19-97. NYP:

"At the New Frontier of Eavesdropping." Markoff.

  Many phone companies are now rushing to introduce new
  digital services that provide better sound quality. But
  when security standards were set for the new systems five
  years ago, technical experts from the Government
  discouraged the phone companies from building in coding
  systems that would be difficult to break. Moreover, the
  phone companies themselves decided that real privacy was
  not a major issue. "Time to market turned out to be more 
  important than real security," said John Gilmore.

  Indeed, in recent weeks the supposedly secret formula for
  scrambling digital wireless phone calls was posted to an
  Internet mailing list. That virtually insures that hackers
  will soon create a way to modify scanners like the one the
  Martins used, making digital calls just as vulnerable as
  analog calls are today. "There's a period in which privacy 
  prevails over surveillance, but it's never for very long."

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