Forwarded From: alan l cottrell <acottrell@juno.com>
HACKERS LIKELY TO COPY CLINTON TESTIMONY
(MIAMI HERALD): The word from the shadowy world of private espionage is
that a tape of President Clinton's video grand-jury testimony on Monday
morning will be in someone's hands by Monday night.
The only foolproof way to avoid this, private investigators said, is to do
exactly what the president doesn't want to do: Be in the same room as the
jury.
"I have no doubt that five minutes after his testimony is finished, a
video copy of it will be made somewhere. The question is, by who?" said
Jim Atkinson, head of the Granite Island Group, a Massachusetts high-tech
security firm.
True, making the tape would be illegal, a violation of federal wiretapping
laws. That wouldn't necessarily stop someone from doing it, of course.
And a potential market could exist from a news organization or others
interested in the Clinton presidency.
The plan Monday is to have prosecutors question the president in the White
House map room. The jurors, sitting a mile away in the federal
courthouse, will watch on real-time, closed-circuit video. Jurors will be
able to ask questions of the president. The White House asked for this
setup to avoid the spectacle of the president going to the courthouse.
But investigators said eavesdropping technology has developed to the point
that if the president's words are transmitted in any form -- including
scrambled computer code over phone lines -- they can be intercepted.
Neither the White House nor independent counsel Kenneth Starr's office
would disclose technical arrangements for the testimony.
Several television news producers said they would seriously consider
airing a tape leaked from inside the grand-jury investigation. But what
about on that was the product of electronic espionage?
"Journalistically, the inclination would be to use it," said Tom Hannon,
political coverage director for CNN. "But this would be an issue decided
at the highest levels of our company and would largely be a decision by
our lawyers."
Security specialists assume the video signal will be sent out on one of
the White House's existing fiber-optic lines, then through a central
switchboard in Washington and on to the courthouse. Professional hackers
said this network can be patched into and the transmission of the
president's testimony readily identified amid the thousands of signals
pulsing through the lines.
As in the case with most White House communications, the signal will be
scrambled to a secret code, then reassembled on the other end by a device
programmed to read the code, a security measure known as encryption. But
investigators do not see this as a major problem.
"There are entire agencies dedicated to breaking encrypted information,"
security expert Rick Orloff said. "Given the resources, anything can be
broken."
-o-
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Received on Sun Aug 16 19:35:09 1998