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 -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."