tcmay@netcom.com:

An interesting article by Seymour Hersh is cited below. It says that NSA had transcripts of the 1991 coup plotters (and presumably other Russian leaders) and that Bush passed these on to Yeltsin to warn him.

A recent article from the Daily Telegraph, another British paper, went on about the possible encryption techniques used by the Russians. It described how reused one-time pads led to the unmasking of Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, Philby et al. Then it suggested that the method the NSA broke was based on (presumably weak) PRNGs, a stream cipher. It suggested that the NSA might have developed techniques to find patterns in PRNG outputs through neural networks, or genetic algorithms!! While the latter sounds like crap to me, even though I've worked with and believe in the power of neural networks for amazing pattern recognition, unless the PRNGs were _really_ weak, I'm skeptical. I don't think the Russians are fools, and in these times one doesn't rely on secret weak algorithms for crypto, not when there are publicly well known strong ones. Humint? Maybe. The Atlantic Monthly will carry a story on the NSA-Yeltsin thing in June. It would be nice if someone posts it here. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh rishab@dxm.ernet.in Voicemail +91 11 3760335; Vox/Fax/Data 6853410 H-34C Saket New Delhi 110017 INDIA The National Fairness to Game Animals Association says: Support your right to arm bears! --------------------------------------------------------------------------