The meeting never happens. But how could anyone have known that the President's limousine would be in the ambush-friendly zone that is Niles Canyon? Security was at its tightest. There were maybe ten people in the U.S. who knew the meeting was going to happen and the Senator hadn't told anyone, not even his wife or his closest aides.

So how could this have happened?

The leak, it turns out, was a simple email message.

A senior White House official needed to send an email message about the President's visit to another senior White House official. Because the subject was about the political conversion of the Senator, the official knew he wasn't allowed to use the secured government email system. Instead, he was required to use the email system set up for political communication.

No harm in that, right?

No harm, except the system set up for political communication didn't go through secured channels. It was run by a 12-person company in Chattanooga Tennessee. The company knew its stuff, and did a great job of managing email. There was just one gotcha. All email had to travel through the public Internet to get to and from the company's servers.

And, as has been the case for the last few years, there was computer in the back of a store on Broad Street, just a few doors down from the Chattanooga company managing the President's political email. Connected to the computer was a simple DSL connection to BellSouth. Nothing fancy -- except that the upstream network provider to the political ISP was also BellSouth.

The computer in the back of the store on Broad Street simply "sniffed" all the network packets it could find, hoping for a whiff of something yummy. This was easy since nearly everything that travels over the Internet is easy to intercept. It made the Internet easy to design initially, but has long been a fatal flaw from the perspective of security.

Some of the packets the computer sniffed could be reconstructed into email messages. And one of the email messages it reconstructed just happened to be one from the one White House staffer to the other White House staffer. Since the Internet is generally open and unsecured, especially when it comes to email, it was really easy to intercept the email messages.

Of course, the computer in the back of that store on Broad street wasn't being operated by anyone with affection for the U.S. government. It was one of the many off-the-shelf PCs bought and placed throughout the country, scanning, hoping to capture something juicy. Something that could be used to hurt America.

This particular message detailed the White House staffer's excitement about the upcoming Niles Canyon road trip. After all, Charlie Chaplin filmed The Champ there and this staffer loved the historical significance.

Littled did our staffer know that, just a few days later, Niles Canyon would forever be known for something far more horrible.

Truth and fiction
What you've just read is, thankfully, pure fiction.

Unfortunately, the scenarios themselves are far more possible than anyone really knows. Over the course of our investigation, we've learned that Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush has lost his BlackBerry hand-held phone more than once.