It was said that Pres. Clinton had given a speech while visiting the CIA HQ in Langley/Virginia. He allegedly said in this speech that obtaining industrial informations has the highest priority and this were the new task for the spies.
Dr. John Deutsch, speaking to the National Press Club, also mentioned economic espionage, with the State Department as a primary customer, but was concerned about definitions of goals, etc. He did reassure the NPC that the CIA would continue to work with drug dealers and corrupt South American military and other scum who have information to sell, as well as cooperating more closely with the FBI and DEA, but on the other hand he does apparently view domestic operations as clearly outside the CIA's job. One set of content in his speech was the planned combination of the various satellite data interpretation organizations into one group of CIA/Pentagon/NRO/NSA/etc. ObCrypto: One questioner asked him about the growing use of encoding and would the CIA be able to keep up eavesdropping on people. "We're very good at eavesdropping" was his main reply; he did acknowledge that there was an issue but didn't go into the party line about needing to have escrow to get GAK. Clinton, meanwhile, reassured guests at a $1000/plate fundraising lunch that the Republicans' economic plans would mainly affect the poor and wouldn't trouble the rich too much... :-) #--- # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #---