The NYT reports today on the administration's new national security team and the formulation of policy to focus on international crime as a national security threat. Cited are thriving Russian black marketers selling hardware, software, and skills developed by the USSR; high-technology which has speeded communication and dissolved national borders; the diffusion of many enemies rather than a single superpower. The nature of crime has changed. No longer limited to drugs, terrorism and flight from justice, now there's money laundering, kidnapping, smuggling, credit card scams, even auto theft. It describes measures to combat this threat to all nations by cooperating and competing foreign affairs, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies around the world. None so trusting of each other. Some fund- and purpose-scrambling agencies klaxon that international crime is now as grave as nuclear proliferation and ethnic conflict. The three threats may merge, and new nations are at greatest peril. Which supports the administration's bulldogged clamp on crypto export limits: if we knew what they knew about rogue, ex-officials arranging their future with successors inside -- they need to communicate in private. What crypto will Perry, Deutch and consorts use to keep secrets among the few who know what we don't -- yet? Cryptanalysts, dissolve borders set by secret pacts. ----- KEE_pin