The President's Book of Secrets Page #5

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portfolio, the staff knows that

it's important to the

Presidency.

Narrator:
But who or what

determines if something is a

crisis, and would the protocols

r that decision be contained

in a book of secrets?

Bohn:
It varies with

President to President, but it

all boils down to recognizing

what's a big deal and what's

not.

Reagan asked that only two

people contact him after hours,

and that was his Chief of Staff

and his National Security

advisor-- whereas other

presidents are much more willing

to talk to most anybody.

Perino:
I remember that

President Bush was awakened when

Chief Justice Rehnquist died,

and you would think that that

might be something that you

could wait until the morning to

tell him, but the Supreme Court

plays such an important role in

the structure of our country

that President Bush had to be

told right away, and so the

Chief of Staff has to make that

decision on whether or not they

were going to be awakened.

Narrator:
Although the White

House has had decades to learn

how to deal effectively with

traditional threats, in the 21st

century, the nation's enemies

are not so easy to detect

or deter.

A cyber attack could

seriously compromise the

nation's financial,

communications, and military

capabilities.

But does the President have

any secret means to protect

our most classified

information, and could that

knowledge be found in the pages

of a book of secrets?

Narrator:
In the age of

smartphones, iPads and Kindles,

might the information contained

in a President's Book of Secrets

now be stored, retrieved and

even carried around digitally?

Could this be the reason why

President Barack Obama is rarely

seen without his BlackBerry, and

if so, might the highly

sensitive communications

contained within it be

vulnerable to leaks or even a

cyber attack?

Chertoff:
You could do it on

an iPad or something like that.

Then you'd have a security issue

because you'd want to make sure

nobody penetrated it.

I mean, I like technology,

but sometimes the plain,

old-fashioned pen and paper

actually work pretty

effectively.

(David Gewirtz) He is a very,

very connected President.

It's part of what got

him elected, and he insisted on

keeping his portable

communications device with him.

Earnest:
As with any cell

phone, the moment he speaks on

it to whoever it is and about

whatever the subject is, that

can be intercepted by people

doing intercepts of electronic

communications, and therefore

you have the possibility, indeed

the probability, that the

conversations of the President

of the United States would be

picked up by someone that we

don't want to pick it up.

Gewirtz:
Eventually, as you

might imagine, the new President

of the United States telling

you to do something-- they

figured out a solution, which

was to build an NSA-secured

version of this device so he's

able to keep in touch with a few

people.

Narrator:
Although President

Obama and others in the White

House staff received secured

phones, the threat of these

devices falling into the wrong

hands is still a problem which

plagues the White House.

Gewirtz:
An iPhone like this,

and I'm just holding it in my

hand, has the capacity of

approximately 1,750 copies of

all seven Harry Potter novels.

It is an astonishing amount of

storage information.

If you start to think about

how much secret government

information could be kept on

one of these devices, it starts

to be astonishing.

You could have secret access

codes.

You could have directions to

undisclosed locations.

You could have so much

information, and that's just if

you got ahold of the device.

Now, there is a second and much

more scary issue if it falls

into enemy hands and then is

returned back to its owner

unchanged.

There is the ability to put onto

a smartphone, in about 15

minutes, a piece of software

that runs undetectably and turns

a BlackBerry or other smartphone

into a very dangerous

surveillance device.

For example, there was a recent

theft of White House

Blackberries in New Orleans

during the recent leaders'

conference.

These phones were returned

eventually to their owners, but

before they're returned to their

owners, they must be wiped

completely and zeroed out and

rebuilt because the potential of

having basically a piece of

software hidden in the

background that's doing very,

very dangerous things exists.

And this is not science fiction.

The thing about these security

breaches is that they seem

incredibly benign, they seem

really simple, but when you're

talking about the Executive

Office of the President of the

United States, we all care.

Bohn:
Every telephone, every

bit of electronic gear can be a

transmitter and a receiver.

And so it's feasible that a

telephone can pick up certain

RF emanations within the Oval

Office and transmit it.

We've certainly done it.

We've stood outside foreign

embassies and followed IBM mag

typewriters, and could replicate

everything that was typed on

that machine that way.

Narrator:
When Michael Bohn

became the Director of the White

House situation room, he noticed

a similar vulnerability.

Bohn:
When I got there, there

were no RF shields on the

windows, and I said, somebody

could sit at the Hay-Adams

Hotel across the street and

pick up conversations from the

Oval Office.

And I threw a fit.

And the Secret Service said,

"Don't worry about it, we got

it covered."

But I had the sit room windows

covered with a fine metal mesh

that would stop certain kinds

of radiation from coming in or

going out.

Narrator:
In July 2009,

computer systems in the White

House, the Pentagon and the

New York Stock Exchange began to

crash.

Three days later, State

Department and Homeland

Security web sites disappeared,

and servers at the Treasury,

National Security Agency and

even the Pentagon, came under

attack.

The strikes were the work of

computer hackers, sending out

coded messages from somewhere

in North Korea.

Earnest:
These attacks

amount to an intelligence

attack.

It is probing your defenses.

And some would say, preparing

the battlefield in case there

were a cyber war.

Narrator:
The damage was

eventually contained, and the

evidence showed no attempt to

gain control over any government

systems, but the cyber attack

revealed a vulnerability that

has existed since 1985, when

e-mail was first used in the

White House under President

Ronald Reagan.

Gewirtz:
When you or I send

an e-mail message, nothing

really is gonna go wrong if

somebody sees it.

If somebody in the White House

sends an e-mail message, and it

gets intercepted before it

should be, people could die.

Earnest:
The United States

is subjected to thousands of

cyber attacks every single day.

Will some of those places where

they penetrate lead to

information which is

classified, sensitive, or

information they don't have?

Can they get far enough to,

perhaps, take over a computer,

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