1-19-97. NYP: "At the New Frontier of Eavesdropping." Markoff. Many phone companies are now rushing to introduce new digital services that provide better sound quality. But when security standards were set for the new systems five years ago, technical experts from the Government discouraged the phone companies from building in coding systems that would be difficult to break. Moreover, the phone companies themselves decided that real privacy was not a major issue. "Time to market turned out to be more important than real security," said John Gilmore. Indeed, in recent weeks the supposedly secret formula for scrambling digital wireless phone calls was posted to an Internet mailing list. That virtually insures that hackers will soon create a way to modify scanners like the one the Martins used, making digital calls just as vulnerable as analog calls are today. "There's a period in which privacy prevails over surveillance, but it's never for very long." ----- INV_ade