- A core objection to paranoid rants regarding the US National
Security Agency (NSA) electronic eavesdropping apparatus called ECHELON
is the simple observation that spooks trying to use it are literally buried
in an avalanche of white noise from which it's quite difficult to extract
anything pertinent.
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- But now the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), no
doubt with some assistance and guidance from NSA, is making strides towards
cracking that little inconvenience.
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- The CIA's Office of Advanced Information Technology is
developing a number of data-mining enhancements to make life easy for those
who would eavesdrop on electronic communications, Reuters reports.
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- First up is a computer program called Oasis, which automatically
converts audio signals into conveniently readable, and searchable, text.
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- And it distinguishes voices, cleverly enough, so that
the transcript of an intercepted 'broadcast' (a conference call via mobile
phones?) will show each speaker automatically identified as Male 1, Female
1; Male 2, Female 2; and so on.
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- If the transcript seems implausible at any point, or
disappointingly mundane, the operator can easily listen to relevant parts
of the broadcast to check the machine's accuracy, and determine that "recognize
speech" actually was "wreck a nice beach," and send in the
appropriate goon squads to prevent it.
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- Oasis also references search terms and keywords automatically.
Thus text containing the phrase "truck bomb" would pop up in
a query for "terror*".
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- The CIA is planning to develop Oasis for spy-useful foreign
languages such as Arabic and Chinese, the wire service says.
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- Next comes a software tool called FLUENT, which enables
an operator to search stored documents in a language s/he doesn't understand
by using his or her own language for queries.
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- So, imagine an uneducated, highly-trained Anglophone
with a PhD in some anti-intellectual pseudo-'discipline' like medicine,
education, women's studies, engineering, creative writing, economics or
computer science, naturally poorly acquainted with languages, but charged
with grave national security responsibilities.
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- Say this person needs to know what the Chinese have been
publishing about nuclear warheads.
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- Salvation: FLUENT allows them to search on "nuclear
warhead" in English, and still dredge up Chinese (or whatever) documents
for people with actual language skills to translate and evaluate for them.
Is that cool or what?
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- Presently, FLUENT can translate Chinese, Korean, Portuguese,
Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Ukrainian, Reuters says.
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- The omissions are almost as telling as the languages
included. What, no Japanese, no Arabic, no Spanish, no Hebrew, no French?
Laotian and Navajo we can understand, but what have we here? Laziness,
discrimination, or misplaced trust?
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- You make the call.
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