7-12-95. NYPaper: "U.S. Tells How It Found Soviets Sought A-Bomb: Discloses Clues That Led to Code-Breaking." The American intelligence establishment today unveiled one of its oldest secrets: how a small team of codebreakers found the first clues that the Soviet Union sought to steal the blueprints for the atomic bomb in World War II. Using just brain power -- no computers, no stolen skeleton keys -- the cryptographers slowly cracked what was thought to be an unbreakable code. Their work and the fact that they had broken the Soviets' seemingly impenetrable cipher, was until today one of the most tightly held secrets of the National Security Agency, the nation's electronic eavesdropping service. The messages were like a jigsaw puzzle with a billion pieces -- all black. They had been double-coded by a system called a one-time pad -- a unique random code for each message, converting words to numbers in a pattern used only once. HOO_doo [Book review] "What Would Happen if E.T. Actually Called: The implications of finding other intelligence in the universe." Mr. Davies is a supporter of the program called SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which aims radio telescopes at thousands of target star systems to try to detect communications from extraterrestrial civilizations. He argues that if we do pick up any signals, or even if we just determine that there is a single microorganism out there that formed independently of earthly contamination, this "would drastically alter our world view and change our society as profoundly as the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions." It would be, Mr. Davies writes, nothing less than "the greatest scientific discovery of all time." ETT_eeg "AT&T Expected to Buy Stake In an Internet Access Provider Cementing its recent link with one of the country's largest corporate Internet access providers, the AT&T Corporation will spend $8 million to buy a stake in the BBN Planet Corporation, according to an executive familiar with the company's plans. BBN_bye 3x Pad: QED_jak