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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Computer Worm Hits Several Media Companies

Aired August 16, 2005 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again. We're reporting tonight from the middle of the computer equivalent of a flu outbreak, though, for a time today, we thought it might be more like computer Ebola.
A worm targeting computers running Windows 2000, the operating system, shutting them down, starting them up, then shutting them down again and starting them up. Some in government, some in business. It's 125 different businesses, many in certain types of business. Mostly media companies, including this one, which, in part, explains our interest.

But it raises the same questions regardless: Who did it and why, of course? Were computers and companies targeted or did they just catch something? Why some, and not others? Accident or good planning? I.T. departments will be answering their bosses' questions tomorrow.

We'll start tonight with CNN's Ali Velshi.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ALI VELSHI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): 1:30 p.m. Eastern time, computers running Windows 2000 flashing a warning message, "Shut down in 60 seconds." Then, blank screens.

Moments later, the computer's rebooted, only to show the same warning message. And then they shut down again, and started up again and again. It happened here at CNN, in New York and in Atlanta. But calls went out to fellow journalists and concern grew, as "The New York Times," ABC News, big equipment-maker Caterpillar, and other companies reported outages, as well.

At least 125 companies worldwide all infected by the same computer virus. Emergency services were intact, but in Washington problems on Capitol Hill, in the U.S. Senate, though not in the House of Representatives.

The seed was planted a week ago, on August 9th, when Microsoft released a bulletin warning of a vulnerability. Hackers target Microsoft a lot. Critics say its older operating systems weren't strong enough.

Well, as usual, Microsoft issued a patch. It's a fix for the problem that Windows 2000 users had to download. On Friday, according to Microsoft, a malicious hacker posted information on how to exploit that vulnerability. By Sunday, Microsoft said the attack was under way. They called it Zotob.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Overtime, we've been moving closer and closer to that Day Zero attack. And this Zotob virus is the closest yet. Announced Sunday, exploits were almost immediately available. And 48 hours later, there are over six variants that are currently attacking companies across the world.

VELSHI: Microsoft says it's low-impact, but would not specify how many companies or computers could be at risk. Symantec, which makes virus blockers, called it a major attack, a level three out of five. Virus expert Joe McGee (ph) says communications companies are particularly vulnerable because they communicate through the same network.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My feeling is that these worms, we're not going to see a lot of widespread attacks to and from the Internet, as much as we're going to see exactly what happened at CNN today or the past few days, which is, you know, one machine gets it and then it randomly kind of hits up everybody, because it's built to do that. It's built to stay within the network and infect locally, opposed to globally.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VELSHI: And that's the idea. The idea is that it spreads more quickly around companies that have large internal systems. Microsoft actually said this is targeted apparently more at corporations than at individual users. News is trickling in. UPS says it was affected earlier today. But no major impact yet.

BROWN: Well, it was major in my office, I'll tell you that. Were we targeted? Did someone say, "OK, let's go get CNN, 'New York Times,' ABC News, Caterpillar, the U.S. Senate?" Because the word "targeted" was used. It was used in your report.

VELSHI: Hackers like to target Microsoft. They're...

BROWN: So Microsoft was targeted.

VELSHI: Microsoft was targeted.

BROWN: OK, we weren't targeted. Microsoft was targeted. Why do some computers get it?

VELSHI: Older software systems. Older...

(CROSSTALK)

BROWN: But here, let me try it differently. I'm such a computer geek, as I realize that I'm not always helpful here. Were all computers running Windows 2000 who had not downloaded a security patch equally vulnerable?

VELSHI: They're equally vulnerable. They didn't all get it, because a lot of this developed through the course of the day. So some companies would have shut off and gone home for business, maybe by morning, their I.T. departments will have fixed it or they'll know about the fix.

But tomorrow morning, a lot of people could turn on their computer, get onto the Internet, and get it, starting in the morning. Every computer that did not have the patch that was running Windows 2000 that is connected to the Internet is vulnerable.

BROWN: It was equally vulnerable.

VELSHI: That's right.

BROWN: Actually, just to underscore something, a point you made this evening, which I thought was a great point. When your phone goes out, you don't know if it's your phone or the phone company. Two summers ago, when I lost power in my house, I didn't realize that the whole east coast of the country had lost power. And to some extent, that came into play today.

VELSHI: Absolutely. When we thought it was just us, we thought, "Yes, yes, something's going on with the system in the building." When you start finding out it's a few more people that might be outside of the city, sure, the way it works these days, we get a little concerned and you want to check to be sure.

Only time will tell whether we were right to do that. But that's what we have to do.

BROWN: Thank you. And a good job today. You worked hard. Thank you.

Kevin Mitnick is perhaps the best-known hacker out there for awhile. He was perhaps the most notorious, as well. He did time for it. He has since gone straight, he assures us. Mr. Mitnick now is a security consultant, most recently the author of "The Art of Intrusion." We talked to him last week. We talk to him again tonight.

Good to see you again, Kevin.

KEVIN MITNICK, SECURITY CONSULTANT: Hi, Aaron.

BROWN: If we were vulnerable, and ABC, and "The New York Times," and perhaps 122 other companies were vulnerable, is the, let's say the FAA, which actually could make a life or death difference, equally vulnerable?

MITNICK: Certainly. Well, it really depends, because most companies should have been protected because they have firewalls that block access to the particular point that the attackers would have had to exploit. What I suspect is telecommuters that bring in their laptops into the corporate environment might have already been infected and that's how it spread throughout these organizations.

BROWN: All right, stop there, because that raises two questions. First question: Not to pick on our I.T. guys, OK, but should our I.T. guys or ABC's I.T. guys, and all these other companies, should they have anticipated this? Was there any way for them to have anticipated this? Should we have been protected?

MITNICK: Absolutely. In fact, the port, the access tunnel that the attacker would have to use, has no business being exposed to the Internet by any corporation. We call it -- the technical term is net bios port. This should not be exposed.

So it's very likely that how this, again, got in to CNN, "New York Times," was through internal employees bringing in infected computers.

BROWN: OK. I'll never get my computer fixed again by our I.T. department. Let me go to the second point, just to make sure I understand it.

What I think you're saying is that we -- in many cases, laptops are what we have -- we take our laptops home, we hook them up to the Internet, we take them here, we take them there. We bring them back to the office, and it's got these germs on it, and it infects the whole office. It's like sneezing.

MITNICK: Exactly, 100 percent correct. Now, there are some organizations that might have very well exposed this particular service to the Internet, but that would really be irresponsible, because there are so many vulnerabilities associated with this particular service.

BROWN: Is it your experience that companies that really are involved in sort of life and death matters, whether it's first- responders, police departments, fire departments, EMTs, the FAA, the Pentagon, what have you, that they have policies that would prevent, for example, someone from bringing their laptop in and infecting the whole Pentagon?

MITNICK: Yes. More companies and government organizations are moving towards those policies. And they require telecommuters or employees that are bringing in their own computers or company-owned laptops to have particular software on those laptops to ensure that a personal firewall is turned on to ensure that there is anti-virus software on that computer and that it's up-to-date.

BROWN: Kevin, good to see you. Thanks, buddy.

MITNICK: Hey, thank you.

BROWN: Thank you.

One of our technology reporters said to me tonight, "This was probably the work of some young guys who got a hold of some bad stuff, and things got out of control." I'm 56. That sounded to me like a teen drinking and pot party gone bad. To him it meant something else.

Daniel Sieberg tonight on bots, worms, viruses, and how what happened today happened.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) DANIEL SIEBERG, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): There's a reason it's called malicious software. It goes by a couple names, Zotob or Rbot, but the names don't matter. What matters is that the latest Internet worm has caused a loss of productivity and maybe worse for several major companies and even home users across the country.

PETER ALLOR, INTERNET SECURITY SYSTEMS: It's spreading across the Internet. It's looking for vulnerable machines, amplifies a vulnerable machine, and it opens a command on your machine and downloads a file to your machine. And from there, you'll try -- your machine will try to infect other machines, as well.

SIEBERG: It spreads without the user even seeing it. There are no e-mail attachments. It looks for computers running Windows 2000 or some versions of Windows XP and ones that have an unpatched Microsoft hole.

When the worm finds a hole, it causes the machines to reboot, over and over again, and could open a back door so someone out there could take over your computer.

DEBBY FRY WILSON, MICROSOFT: Certainly, a worm by definition is malicious software. It is somebody intending to cause harm to computer users. This is criminal activity. And we are working with law enforcement to identify who's responsible.

SIEBERG: Security analysts say it's unclear who is to blame or whether certain companies were targeted. With CNN, ABC, and "The New York Times" all reeling from this latest computer worm, some speculate it's at least an attempt to garner media attention.

Best course of action at this point, head to microsoft.com and get the patch.

Daniel Sieberg, CNN, Atlanta.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Bit more now on how all this ties in to your computer. Ronald Nutter joins us. He's a network administrator technology writer, and he's in Lexington, Kentucky, tonight. And in New York, Omar Wasow. He's a tech analyst and a friend of the program, and we're glad to see you both.

Well, let me start, Omar. Could we, should we have, all of these companies -- and there were apparently a good number of them -- should they have been ahead of the curve here and protected themselves? Because that leads to the question, how do we protect ourselves? So let's start there.

OMAR WASOW, TECHNOLOGY ANALYST: Well, there was some lead time here. There wasn't much, but there was this patch issued by Microsoft, so there was certainly that that could have been done sooner. You also had, as Kevin Mitnick mentioned, ports that are essentially back doors that are open that should not have been open on these computers.

So there is a bit of kind of finger wagging that goes toward these companies for not having done a better job of protecting themselves.

BROWN: My hindsight's perfect. Mr. Nutter, would, if we all switched to Macintoshes, would that solve the problem?

RONALD NUTTER, NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR: Well, you know, it would to a degree because the proficiency for writing viruses is much less with a Macintosh platform. But, you know, people who write viruses are going to go where the demand is.

BROWN: So, if we all switch to Macintoshes, Omar, they'll just start writing viruses. Why do they write these things? What's the -- is the jolly here that we're talking about it on TV or that they, you know, screwed up Wolf Blitzer today? Or what's the point?

WASOW: Think of it a bit like it's not just vandalism, but it's also graffiti. It is my name up there, everybody looking.

BROWN: It's just that stupid?

WASOW: Well, it's also, it's a certain -- at my high school, people used to take great pleasure in cracking the master lock, you know, just because they could. And, you know, it wasn't that they wanted to steal something. It was just to be able to -- the intellectual puzzle of solving the riddle.

BROWN: Yes, Ronald?

NUTTER: It was fairly common several years ago that, in order to graduate the computer science programs in universities overseas, such as Czechoslovakia and, in some cases, Israel that you had to write a virus as proof of concept that you understood how a computer worked. And in some cases, those actually got out into the wild. And you know, we unfortunately had to experience a few of those.

BROWN: Sounds like the initiation into organized crime.

Is there a -- short of having -- assuming that everyone has -- I probably shouldn't -- anti-virus protection on their computer at home? And assuming, which I know isn't true, that they keep it up-to-date, Ron, is there -- do people have anything to worry about?

NUTTER: You know, if they're taking all the reasonable precautions, that they've got anti-virus installed, that they're keeping it up-to-date, that they're keeping the signatures up-to-date, they have their Windows patches applied, both for the operating system and, for instance, Microsoft Office products that are installed, if, you know, they're using some sort of firewall at home or maybe more than one, that is current and updated, there's not any one thing that you can do. It's multiple pieces to a puzzle.

BROWN: Omar, I bet you there's not 1 in 500 people watching tonight that knows whether they have a firewall installed at home. WASOW: I think that's fair.

BROWN: And many don't know if they have a fire alarm in their home, OK? I mean, honestly.

WASOW: All they know is when it beeps at them.

BROWN: Yes.

WASOW: It's a bit like flossing your teeth. It's the sort of thing a lot of people know is a good thing to do and they're not very consistent about it.

BROWN: Look, the people, whether it's Microsoft or Apple, I mean the people who write operating systems, these are very complicated pieces of software. Are they always and forever going to be vulnerable, period?

WASOW: Yes and no. I mean, part of what made this one particularly pernicious is it went after the older Windows operating systems. It would be harder to do this for the newer ones.

But it is always going to be an arms race. There are always going to be, you know, sort of ports left open by accident and people figuring out ways to exploit them.

BROWN: Thank you both. Good to see you. Thank you very much.

In a moment, how babies get kept off airliners. First, we first reported this the other day. Now we've really got the story to tell, as it were. But at about a quarter past the hour, give or take ten seconds, some of the other stories that made news today.

Erica Hill joins us tonight from Atlanta. Good evening to you, Ms. Hill.

ERICA HILL, CNN HEADLINE NEWS ANCHOR: Hi, Aaron. Good to see you.

We start off with some news of moving day, which may be coming up in Crawford, Texas. Moving day, that is, for antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan. Now, Sheehan says a neighbor of President Bush has offered a piece of his land to the protesters. That property is actually closer to the president's 1,600-acre ranch than the camp protesters are now using. They call it Camp Casey, named after Sheehan's son who was killed in Iraq.

Another airline crash, a Colombian charter jet flying from Panama to Martinique, crashed in Venezuela. The crew of the West Caribbean MD-82 aircraft reported engine trouble just before the crash. It was blamed on engine failure. All 160 on board were killed.

And another different kind of computer trouble today. Instead of a bot or a worm, this was actually a stampede. Check this out: Thousands of people packed the Richmond International Raceway in Virginia when the county school system decided to sell off 1,000 used Apple iBooks for $50 bucks apiece. These were 4-years-old. One person in the crowd called the scene "total chaos."

Meantime, not such a happy birthday for Madonna. A little chaos there, as well. While celebrating her 47th birthday at her English country estate, the material girl fell off a horse. The singer was rushed to a hospital in Salisbury. She was treated there for three cracked ribs, a broken collar bone, and a broken hand. Not really on your list of birthday wishes.

BROWN: That's a tough day at the office for Madonna.

HILL: Absolutely.

BROWN: Thank you very much. We'll see you in about a half an hour.

More on the program tonight, starting with the latest from a hotly disputed patch of land where some people tonight are standing their ground.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN (voice-over): They're being dragged away kicking and screaming, as the Israeli army prepares for a whole lot worse. It is moving day in Gaza.

DENNIS RADER, CONFESSED BTK KILLER: Went back and removed their handcuffs, and then tied her up, and then eventually strangled her.

BROWN: As if words and deeds weren't chilling enough, there is more to tell in the saga of BTK.

Also, a town created in God's image.

TODD MONAGHAN, AVE MARIA FOUNDER: We've been thinking about this for many, many years. It's very exciting.

BROWN: But whose God? And what image?

And later, a terror, perhaps, but not a terrorist, though the airline thought so.

INGRID SANDEN, MOTHER: We found out that she was on the no-fly list, and we didn't really understand why.

BROWN: Why airlines can't tell the difference between the terrible twos and plain old terrorism. No confusion here, though. We know exactly who we are. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, goes back to court tomorrow, the first day of his sentencing hearing. There is, in truth, something maddening about it. He will relish every second of time spent retelling in graphic detail the crimes he committed, the murders. He will relish the attention the courts and we give him, because that's what it is, attention. There's no way around it. And in truth, there is no way to avoid it.

Here's CNN's Jonathan Freed.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JONATHAN FREED, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When Dennis Rader last appeared in court in June and confessed to being Wichita's infamous BTK serial killer, his testimony was, in a word, dispassionate.

DENNIS RADER, CONFESSED BTK KILLER: ... went ahead and I tied her up, and put a bag over her head and strangled her.

FREED: Rader's detached delivery...

RADER: Eventually moved her to the trunk of the car, oh...

FREED: ... was, to some, as shocking as the details of the crime he described. The man who heads the police unit that caught Rader was categorical.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He has no remorse of what he does. He's proud of what he did. He would have done it again.

FREED: The testimony at Rader's sentencing hearing, which gets under way tomorrow, is expected to be even more gruesome. Eight police officers will likely provide specifics about how Rader fulfilled his sexual fantasies while committing murder.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The testimony's going to be very graphic.

FREED: The families of all 10 victims will be at the courthouse. Kelly Cochran (ph) is heading up a fundraising effort to help cover things, like their travel expenses. Cochran (ph) used to work for the police department, where she learned some of the details set to come out at the hearing.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A lot of the family members have never heard or seen any of the evidence that they're going to hear and see. And it's traumatic.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: BTK is arrested.

(APPLAUSE)

FREED: It's been almost six months since police charged Rader with a string of 10 murders from 1974 to 1991, a crime spree that terrorized Wichita. Rader toyed with police over the years by sending cryptic notes through the news media. He even coined his own nickname back in the '70s.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: BTK stands for "Bind, Torture and Kill."

FREED: Taken together, the sentences for the murders could total at least 175 years. The prosecution will be pushing for all the sentences to be served consecutively, which would, effectively, deny Rader any chance of parole.

Jonathan Freed, CNN, Wichita, Kansas.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In other news tonight, the investigation into Sunday's airliner crash in Greece continued to raise troubling questions. Search-and-recovery teams still have not found the pilot's body. The inside of the flight voice recorder came out in the crash and has not been found. The flight data recorder, though, has been found. It's on its way to Paris where it will be analyzed.

And more is being learned tonight about the final moments inside the plane. The local coroner saying many of the passengers were alive when the plane crashed, but they may not have been conscious.

And back in Cyprus, police raided the office of the airlines involved, this after prosecutors expressed unhappiness with the level of cooperation that they've been getting so far.

Still to come on the program tonight, the struggle over Gaza, the settlers who are not leaving.

And later, any mother would be angry if her child were linked to terrorism, especially when the child is a baby. A break first from New York. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: By this time tonight, parts of Gaza were supposed to be quite literally a no-man's-land, empty for the next seven weeks or so. Israeli settlers making way for Palestinian settlers.

All the Israelis were supposed to be gone by now. Instead, thousands remain, along with thousands of Israeli soldiers.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): For the settlers of Gaza, time ran out. Their dream of a greater Israel extending to this land, land they believed God granted them, ended because their government said it must end, too expensive to protect, too little value to try and hold.

In the middle of this, the Israeli army. In a country of many differences, it is the army that is the common thread. All serve, so all are connected.

Soldiers cut through the gates at the largest settlement in Gaza today, their trucks moving in to help or, if necessary, force the settlers to move out. They were met by taunts and bonfires in the road. Protesters were arrested, water cannons put out the fires, moving trucks rolled in with soldiers walking alongside.

Most of the 9,000 settlers of Gaza will move willingly, if not happily. They will receive between $300,000 and $500,000 to relocate, just as they received money to move here in the first place. Some are standing their ground tonight, risking forced evictions and the threat of diminished compensation.

DEBBIE ROZEN, GAZA SETTLER: There are things that you can't buy with money, like values.

BROWN: For all on the Israeli side, this was a day without joy, without joy for the soldiers to be sure, without joy for the settlers, many of whom are orthodox Jews, and many of them believe, as Rachel Sapperstein believes.

RACHEL SAPPERSTEIN, GAZA SETTLER: This beautiful country is to be given piece by piece by piece to terrorist organizations. When does it stop? Where does it stop? Let them tell us the truth.

BROWN: So tonight, much anger. Houses being burned so they can't be occupied by Palestinians. Threats to stay, despite the law, despite the army.

LEAH FOGEL, GAZA SETTLER: We're not packing. We're not leaving. We believe in staying here.

MAJ. GEN. DAN HAREL, ISRAELI ARMY: We will not accept any threats or incitement to violence or any sort of violence. And those who break the law will be arrested.

BROWN: Today in Gaza, time ran out for the settlers. Tomorrow, those who remain will be forced to leave, to go back to Israel, a smaller Israel than today's.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In the post-9/11 world, the country spends $4 billion a year to make airplanes safer. You stand in line. You go through screening. They check you out.

Behind the scenes, what you can't see is a government compiling a list of those who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a commercial flight, the no-fly list, terrorist suspects, people connected to terrorist suspects, people connected to people connected to terrorist suspects, and, as it turns out, a fair number of people not in any way, shape, or form connected to terror at all, and their kids.

Here's CNN's Jeanne Meserve.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN HOMELAND SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Is this the face of terror? Is this young girl on a jungle gym training to be an al Qaeda operative? One airline apparently thought it was possibility. Last Thanksgiving, when she was only a year old, she was stopped from getting a boarding pass at a ticket kiosk at the Phoenix airport.

INGRID SANDEN, MOTHER: After some flurry of activity and some phone calls, I guess, and some frantic typing on the computer, we found out that she was on the no-fly list. And we didn't really understand why.

MESERVE: Though she shared a name with a known or suspected terrorist, she clearly did not share the same birth date.

RAPHAEL RON, SECURITY ANALYST: Completely unacceptable.

MESERVE: Security analyst Raffi Ron says mistaking kids and prominent Americans like Senator Ted Kennedy for individuals on the no-fly list demonstrates what is missing from airport security.

RON: We have to reintroduce common sense into the system, so that people use their understanding and thought (ph).

MESERVE: The Transportation Security Administration, responsible for making sure airport passengers are screened, says that within the last few months, it has taken steps to address the situation.

MARK HATFIELD, TSA SPOKESMAN: We make sure that every name on the no-fly list has a birth date associated with it. That's a big step in getting to eliminating these false matches.

MESERVE: But right now, most airlines do not ask for birth dates when tickets are purchased, though they are responsible for cross- checking passenger and no-fly lists. That means the process of eliminating an obvious non-terrorist, like a child, doesn't take place until the day of travel, causing inconvenience and even missed flights.

(on camera): A new security system called Secure Flight is intended to further reduce the instances in which innocent travelers are mistaken for terrorists. It would collect more passenger information and have the TSA, rather than the airlines, run it against the no-fly list. But even the early phases won't begin until late this year.

(voice-over): Though there are a handful of children among the estimated 100,000 people on the no-fly and other watch lists, this young lady is not one of them. But to avoid hassles, her flights are now booked using a nickname.

SANDEN: My husband and I sometimes think she has a little bit of terror in her. And she's not always that much fun to fly with, but no, she's not a terrorist.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: I can fly.

MESERVE: For CNN's America Bureau, Jeanne Meserve, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Also on the "Security Watch" tonight, there is a high- tech/low-tech debate going on in the intelligence community in Washington. Expensive eye in the sky spy satellites versus old- fashioned eye on the ground, real human spies. Each has value, of course, and each limitations. So how do you want to spend $40 billion? Here's CNN's David Ensor.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Spy satellites peering down on the Soviet Union were terrific assets for U.S. intelligence during the Cold War. But they have proved much less useful against al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi insurgents.

Now John Negroponte, the nation's director of national intelligence, must decide whether to endorse plans for about $40 billion worth of new surveillance satellites. Many intelligence professionals expect him instead to make cuts, and spend more on unmanned aerial vehicles like the Global Hawk and on old-fashioned human spies on the ground, now a top priority for the U.S. government.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FORMER POWELL CHIEF OF STAFF: What did satellites tell us about Iraq? Nothing that was true that I can see, and I've been there.

ENSOR: Lawrence Wilkerson was Colin Powell's right-hand man when he was secretary of state.

WILKERSON: What happened in Afghanistan that was so effective? CIA people walking around with briefcases full of money.

Well, $40 billion is a lot of money. Let's fill some briefcases. Let's go buy some people.

ENSOR: Even a small percentage of that money would buy a lot of people.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's an awful lot of bribery and spies to increase our human intelligence capabilities. That would be relevant to fighting terrorism in a way that reconnaissance satellites simply couldn't be.

ENSOR: But the decision is difficult. The new spy satellites could give the nation remarkable new capabilities.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There will be more imagery available from them. All done in a smaller, smaller size satellite.

ENSOR: One type, known as Future Imagery Architecture, would make extraordinarily crisp digital pictures of ever smaller objects on Earth, and add still better radar for gazing through clouds and to see what's happening at night.

Another highly classified type known to outside experts as the Misty Follow-On Project, would, they say, deploy tiny satellites, the size of a large TV or a small refrigerator.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This new satellite would be so small and so stealthy, it would simply blend into the space debris, and there would be no way to tell it from the other 10,000 pieces of space junk.

ENSOR: Why would that help? In any future war, the enemy would not know how to blind U.S. intelligence.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The concern that the intelligence community would have would be that if we got into a war with say, China, they would be able to shoot down our non-stealthy spy satellite and basically put our eyes out.

ENSOR: At a recent hearing, Negroponte's deputy promised he'll make a choice by the end of September.

(on camera): If Negroponte decides to cut billions for spy satellites and spend more on lower tech intelligence, as many observers expect, the stage could be set for a battle with the Pentagon, and its congressional allies, who want to see all the satellite surveillance capability that they can get.

(voice-over): It would be a key test, too, of whether the president trusts John Negroponte on intelligence matters, or whether he really prefers the Pentagon's Donald Rumsfeld.

David Ensor, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still to come on NEWSNIGHT, perhaps the ultimate gated community, where everybody knows your name and everybody agrees with everyone else.

And later, another tragedy in Afghanistan. A helicopter goes down. The details and more as NEWSNIGHT continues on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Imagine a place where everyone thinks like you think, believes what you believe. Imagine living in a place where not only is everyone the same religion, but practices that religion in the same way, enjoys the same books and movies, the same politics and TV. Todd Monaghan envisioned such a place, a place where everyone believes as he believes. He also has the money to make it happen. Here's CNN's Susan Candiotti.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SUSAN CANDIOTTI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Here in the tomato fields of Collier County, Florida, Tom Monaghan hopes to find a home for his conservative, Catholic university, and build a new town for like-minded Catholics.

(on camera): Is this your dream?

TODD MONAGHAN, AVE MARIA FOUNDER: Oh, yes. And I've been thinking about this for many, many years. So it's very exciting.

CANDIOTTI (voice-over): His dream is a university and a town he's calling Ave Maria -- Latin for "Hail Mary."

(on camera): What kind of Catholic would want to live in this town?

MONAGHAN: I think a strong Catholic, where their faith means a lot to them. There will be masses available all day long. Confession probably available all day long.

CANDIOTTI: On the interim campus in Naples, Florida, some students applaud Monaghan's vision.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's very exciting to think about having a town where we know that the morals on the television will be according to Christian values, and the stores will sell things according to Christian values.

CANDIOTTI: In Ave Maria, Monaghan would like to ban the sale of contraceptives, condemned by the church, but a ban routinely ignored by many Catholics.

MONAGHAN: We would do what we could to prohibit merchants from doing that. And because we'd own all the commercial real estate, we would probably be able to do that.

CANDIOTTI: Ave Maria's developers admit it's an unusual approach.

BLAKE GABLE, DEVELOPER: This is one of those items that we know it's important to Tom, so we've broached the idea with some of the potential retailers, and candidly, this is something they've really never been asked before.

CANDIOTTI (on camera): Eleven thousand homes are expected to go up on these 5,000 acres. We're talking about about 500 miles of pipes, another couple of hundred miles worth of sidewalks and trails, with the church being the main focus, standing about 30 feet taller than any other building.

(voice-over): Around the church, shops and homes.

For Monaghan, the university will be the big draw.

MONAGHAN: We're trying to create people that are going to change the world. That's exactly what we're trying to do with Ave Maria, is to change the world.

CANDIOTTI: In Monaghan's view, most Catholic universities have become too liberal.

MONAGHAN: We won't have pro-abortion speakers on campus and giving them honorary degrees. We won't have this particular play, I don't even want to mention the name of it, that is shown at many Catholic universities.

CANDIOTTI (on camera): That would be "The Vagina Monologues."

MONAGHAN: Yes, yes.

CANDIOTTI: And a gay film festival? MONAGHAN: That won't happen here.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: My beliefs are very different than Mr. Monaghan's are.

CANDIOTTI (voice-over): Some Catholics question those kinds of restrictions.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Even though I'm a very devout Catholic, I think there are a lot of other possibilities, and that what we should be teaching at the university level are skills to ask questions, really good questions, tough questions, and not to accept blindly that there is one truth.

CANDIOTTI: Monaghan up in an orphanage, and was kicked out of a seminary over a pillow fight. A lifetime later, a Domino's Pizza mega millionaire who never finished college, is pouring $200 million of his fortune into the university and the town.

MONAGHAN: It wouldn't do any good to build 20,000 pizza shops and be worth $30 billion. You can't take it with you.

CANDIOTTI (on camera): What are we looking at here?

MONAGHAN: Right now, we've just walked into the front door of the church.

CANDIOTTI (voice-over): Monaghan hopes to turn out Catholic educators, who, he says, will teach a less watered-down version of the Catholic faith. He prefers a faculty that's mostly Catholic, and in his words, "not mediocre."

(on camera): How do you define a mediocre Catholic?

MONAGHAN: Oh, a cafeteria Catholic that says they're Catholic, but might go to mass at Easter, and go to get their ashes on Palm Sunday, and call themselves Catholic, and probably are oftentimes are pro-abortion.

CANDIOTTI: Some are uneasy with Monaghan's approach.

PETER STEINFELS, FORDHAM CENTER ON RELIGION AND CULTURE: My concern is that they criticize all the other models of going about this, as though they were the only ones that met the test of genuine religious Catholic commitment and orthodoxy. And I think that's a grave error and a disservice to other people in Catholic higher education.

CANDIOTTI: Monaghan sees it more simply.

MONAGHAN: The biggest impact I can have for what I want to do, the results I want to have, with what God's given me, and that is to frankly, to help as many people as possible get to heaven. And that's the best way I know how to do it.

CANDIOTTI: And Ave Maria in Monaghan's view could be heaven's stepping stone.

Susan Candiotti, on the future site of Ave Maria, Florida.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still to come on the program tonight, should having a cold mean getting a prescription to treat it? Why medicines are coming off the counter. The answer has little to do with medicine, and everything to do with drugs. A break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: And it's been a very grim, grim summer in Iraq, as well. We're in the midst of the fourth worst month of the war in terms of American casualties there.

Coming up still tonight, the picture of the day. A couple of contenders. "Morning Papers," too.

But first, at about quarter until the hour, time once again for some of the other stories that made news tonight. Which means time once again for Erica Hill in Atlanta -- Erica.

HILL: Hi again, Aaron.

Spain is of course one of the countries contributing peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan. Well, today, 17 Spanish soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash in western Afghanistan. The cause of that crash has not been determined. But it is the largest single loss of life yet for NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Oregon about to become the first state to require prescriptions for cold and allergy medications containing pseudoephedrine. The medications can be converted into methamphetamine, hence the move. Governor Ted Kulongoski signed legislation today requiring the prescriptions. Now, it's probably going to take three months or more to get that new law working in drug stores. The governor, though, says the law will encourage pharmaceutical companies to put out new medications with safer ingredients.

Eighty-year-old Edgar Ray Killen may be headed back to jail soon. Killen was just convicted of manslaughter in the killing of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. The circuit judge freed Killen on a $600,000 bond Friday after he appealed the conviction. Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, though, has asked to have that bail revoked. In court papers, the attorney general said one of Killen's relatives had threatened to kill the trial judge.

Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. has been admitted to a hospital in Atlanta. The hospital spokesman says the 78-year-old Mrs. King went to the emergency room this morning. She's in fair condition. There are no details about why Mrs. King went to the hospital, but we do know she has canceled several public appearances recently, and that, of course, raising some concerns about her health. Finally, pretty much everyone agrees Tom Hanks, one of the nicest guys in Hollywood. But at Lincoln Cathedral in England, Sister Mary Michael (ph) begs to differ. All right, maybe not about Tom Hanks himself, but she and her fellow followers -- can't believe I got that out, trying saying that 10 times fast -- are protesting the movie he's making there, "The Da Vinci Code." Lincoln is being used as a film location, even though its own vicar calls the book, in his words, "a load of old tosh," Aaron.

BROWN: I don't know what that is exactly.

HILL: I don't either, but I think it's good.

BROWN: I was going to say, doesn't sound like something you'd want on your doorstep, does it? Thank you very much, Ms. Hill.

Yikes. "Morning Papers" after the break.

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BROWN: Lots of good stuff in morning papers, so it's time to check morning papers from around the country and around the world. If I don't do things in exactly the same order every night, I get confused.

"Christian Science Monitor," "Expectations for Iraq downshifting." This has become a theme story. "Washington Post" ran with this this weekend. "Administration downplays missed deadline on Iraq constitution, but political progress is coming slowly." Yes, I would say so. Kind of general downplaying of what we can expect there, including the possibility that it may end up as an Islamic state.

"The Washington Post" -- that would be a bad deal. I mean, just wouldn't be a good deal. I hope they don't do that. And I'm sure they care what I think.

"The Washington Post," troops enter -- good to have "The Post" -- "troops enter settlements in Gaza Strip. Israeli army urges evacuation as hour nears for use of force." I don't know, they're not going to use force, but they're going to move some people out if they don't go. Both sides are just so pained by this in Israel. It's really awful.

Oh, I like this story. I don't really know all the detail. "U.S. policy against axis of evil foundering." I'm not sure why, but it's worth a read in tomorrow's "Washington Post."

This may be the best story of the day, "The Guardian," the British paper. This is the police report on the death of the Brazilian man who was shot on the subway after the 7/7 attack. "He was held before being shot. Police failed to identify him. He made no attempt to run away." "Says one officer, 'I grabbed the male in the denim jacket'" -- not a heavily padded jacket, by the way, as was first reported, "'wrapping both my arms around his torso, pinning his arms to his side, then I pushed him back in the seat where he'd been sitting. And then I heard a gunshot close to my left ear and was dragged away on the floor of the carriage." Not as first reported.

"Stars and Stripes." "Chaplain suspended amid allegations of sex assaults." Yikes! That's two yikes in the same program, I think.

This is a pretty weird story, too, "Richmond Times-Dispatch." "iBook sale creates chaos." We told you about this earlier. They had five off-duty police officers there to take -- to manage security and five security agents. What they ended up using were 71 police officers and 20 in riot gear.

"The Daily News" selling death this morning, or tomorrow morning. "Heroin horror. Death zone. Cops fear one deadly batch of heroin killed five -- killed six in five days downtown."

"Rocky Mountain News," out Denver way, "serious problems block I- 70." Yeah, I'd say so. Look at that picture. My goodness. They're blowing up things there because it's unstable.

If you're traveling tomorrow, and you happen to be in Chicago, what did I do with the weather? Did you do the thing? I love the '80s. It's going to be about 85 in Chicago.

We'll wrap it up with the picture of the day, if we can decide on one, in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Here is your picture of the day, picked by our team of judges, which in fact, is me. Two settlers in Gaza. I just thought this is a wonderfully framed shot that seems to capture the sorrow of the day.

We'll see you tomorrow at 10:00 Eastern time. Good night for all of us.

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