Posted on 12/02/2010 6:53:42 PM PST by mnehring
THE US Department of Defense is lab-testing technology that could make it easier automatically to sift through a vast pool of private communications, including international telephone phone calls, in a similar manner to using an Internet search engine.
THE US Department of Defense is lab-testing technology that could make it easier automatically to sift through a vast pool of private communications, including international telephone phone calls, in a similar manner to using an Internet search engine.
The technology, called "SemanticForests", is a software program that an alyses voice transcripts and other documents in order to allow intelligent searching for specific topics. The software could be used to analyse computer-transcribed telephone conversations.It is named for its use of an electronic dictionary to make a weighted "tree" of meanings for each word in a target document.
Two US Department of Defense academic papers, published as part of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) in1997 and 1998, provide the first evidence that the US government has actually built a working prototype of this technology and is testing it. The papers reveal that the US military had been honing Semantic Forests over at least two years,from 1996 to 1998, to make it more effective at siphoning off useful information.
According to the 1998 paper, the software was originally developed to "work with imperfect speech recogniser transcripts". The US Department of Defense declined to comment on the matter.
In a series of lab tests, the software sifted through large pools of documents, including transcripts of speech and data from Internet discussion groups. In one set of tests, scientists increased thea verage precision rate for finding relevant documents per query from 19 per cent to 27 per cent in just one year, from 1997 to 1998.
It appears that SemanticForests is intelligent enough to handle questions given in plain English. One of the sample questions used to test the software was, "What have the effects of the UN sanctions against Iraq been on the Iraqi people, the Iraqi economy, or world oil prices?"
The US National Security Agency is also closely associated with Semantic Forests. One of the authors of Semantic Forests, Patrick Shone, was also one of the inventors of an NSA-patented system for eavesdropping on international phone calls, which is similar to Semantic Forests.
The NSA applied for the patent, No 5,937,422, seven months before the first Semantic Forest paper was delivered at TREC. However, the patent only became public after winning US Patent Office approval in August this year.
The NSA is believed to conduct large-scale, automatic eavesdropping on some types of written international communications such as e-mail, according to a May 1999 interim report commissioned by European Parliament's Scientific and Technical Options Assessment(STOA) panel.
Glyn Ford MEP, who instigated the STOA's investigation, said he was concerned that the US was testing technology that might be used to eaves drop on international telephone calls. "It appears the NSA has abilities over and above what has been indicated to us to date," he said.
There was "strong circumstantial evidence" that the NSA had been engaged in economic espionage on occasion, passing intercepted information on to American companies to give them a competitive advantage, he said. While he was happy for intelligence agencies to spy on terrorists, he said that the NSA's "blanket approach" to monitoring telephone calls and e-mails was "a serious breach of privacy rights".
Cryptographer Julian Assange, who moderates the online Australian discussion forum AUCRYPTO, discovered the department papers while investigating NSA capabilities. "This is not some theoretical exercise. The US has actually built and lab tested this technology, which is clearly aimed at telephone calls. You don't make a wheel like this unless you have something to put it on," he said.
US Congressman Bob Barr, who previously served with the CIA, said: "This report underscores the need to update oversight procedures and legal standards designed in the 1970s and not updated since, in light of the revolutionary technological changes of the past two decades. A perfected system to intercept voice communications and allow government agencies to precisely pinpoint conversational topics of interest would create a truly awesome potential for privacy-invading abuses."
The outspoken Georgia Republican has been a driving force behind proposed legislation to force the NSA and CIA to report the legal standards that they use while conducting signals intelligence activities,including electronic surveillance. The legislation has passed both houses of Congress and is awaiting signature by President Clinton.
Dr Brian Gladman,the former director of Strategic Electronic Communications at the Ministry of Defence, said the NSA would always like to find better ways to filter "voice traffic" - international phone conversations - automatically for information. "The NSA's problem is finding needles in haystacks, and any technology that can chuck out hay without chucking out needles is of value to them," he said.
"Automation is essential. It is likely the success rate will be low, but this may not be an issue. It is better to deploy something that will allow 10 per cent of the interesting traffic to be found, than doing nothing and finding nothing."
Dr Gladman speculated that the NSA was not using the new technology on international telephone calls at the moment, but was doing trials on it "to see if it is worth deploying".
The two Semantic Forests academic papers came from the speech research branch of the US Department of Defense at Fort Meade, Maryland - the location of the headquarters of the NSA. When the1998paper was downloaded from the TREC conference Internet site, the name of the file was listed as "nsa-rev.pdf".
Could Assange be a foreign COMSEC or INFOSEC?
and why would we care? he is a foreigner...he hates America (so far just like obamanation)... so who cares who pays his way.... it’s all coming from soros anyway when it is traced back....
Something else of note, AUCRYPTO (now defunct) was an old hacker haven who loved to go after US Government facilities. There was always speculation this was a front for foreign intelligence services.
Some of their exploits against US Gov targets are still documented on the net. Example:
http://www.shmoo.com/mail/cypherpunks/feb99/msg00045.html
Oh it gets better.... just throwing out some puzzle pieces now..
ping
why mnehring? maybe I’m missing something here.... I thought it was just liberal people throwing money around to those who would lie and cheat in their quest to destroy America.
I am wondering if there is more to this, instead of just some ‘rich libs’ playing games, if there is an actual intelligence service pulling the strings.. or at least trace this back to something bigger than just some Peter Pansy hacker wannabe.
Trained where? Not normally a self taught skill, in recent times. Herbert Yardley was an exception.
If it looks like a duck .......
It should be shot like a duck!
Hmmmm.. I wonder who else was involved (on the ground) helping swing that Kenyan election.... oh yea...
Now that is interesting.
Thank you very much for the ping and feel free to include me on whatever ping list you may or may not decide to set up relating to this.
Like I said, I think the Wikileaks material is worth combing through insofar as we know that the people running the show in our country are absolute scum and their actions are worth the deepest scrutiny... but that definitely does not make this Assange guy a saint by any stretch.
His motives deserve examination every bit as deep as that applied to our own officials, if not perhaps deeper. My enemy’s enemy can be my friend, but more often than not he is probably my enemy as well.
So, Assange is credited with 'swinging' the Kenyan election away from Obama's cousin (who he lobbied for). This article states 'leaked' documents (this time through a different site) were Odinga's downfall.. hmmmm...
ping 10 and 12..
*
In other words, Assange came to Obama/Odinga's rescue.
Below are Julian's messages from 1995-98 to 2001-02.
Lots of geeky lingo and snotty language; Example
From cypherpunks@MHonArc.venona Wed Dec 17 23:17:14 2003
From: Julian Assange
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 1996 23:41:15 +0800
To: bugtraq@fc.net
Subject: (fwd) National Security Agency
Message-ID: <199602031526.CAA11269@suburbia.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Path: news.aus.world.net!suburbia.net!proff
From: proff@suburbia.net (Julian Assange)
Newsgroups: alt.anagrams
Subject: National Security Agency
Date: 3 Feb 1996 10:50:30 GMT
Organization: AUSNet Services pty. ltd.
Lines: 21
Message-ID: <4evelm$b9n@sydney1.world.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: suburbia.net
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
National Anti-Secrecy Guy
Secret Analytic Guy Union
Caution Laying Any Secret
Run anti Social Agency Yet
Uncle gay, Insane Atrocity
Insane, ugly, acne atrocity
Your testical, again Nancy?
Acute yearly sactioning
Yes, gain unclean atrocity.
Nuns age angelic atrocity
National Gay Secrecy Unit
ftp://suburbia.net/pub/electron/gan.tgz
ping, per another thread you are on, you may find it interesting the picture these pieces are revealing.
I need to write a vanity on this, but he looks like a frustrated, geek who has a chip on his shoulder because he doesn't get enough sex or recognition and wants to upset the applecart to get revenge and/or bragging rights.
Typical psychological profile of a turncoat spy.
Think of the character in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life where Death personified interrupts the dinner party, and one of the guests starts chewing on his glasses and asks Death with a know-it-all smirk, "But *how* could we all have died *at the same time*?"
Typical supercilious, autofellating, insecure, overcompensating, "you should be as impressed with my sophistication and intelligence as *I* am" Eurotwit.
...and besides all that, he looks like Colin Mochrie from the Whose Line Is It Anyway TV show...
Cheers!
he looks like a frustrated, geek who has a chip on his shoulder because he doesn't get enough sex or recognition and wants to upset the applecart to get revenge and/or bragging rights.
I read through some his old postings at the link I posted here and agree. That is exactly the impression I got of this guy. His ID was "cyberpunk". Kinda says it all.
He posted the detailed specs for 'cyber-security' vault that some government agency had out for bids in about 1997 or so. He commented "Who wants to take down this site first?" addressing his hacker buddies. Total arrogant putz!
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