Lan Barnes wrote:
On Fri, May 18, 2007 12:08 am, Randall Shimizu wrote:
If the NSA is searching for keywords in telephone calls then this means
that they have a voice recognition cability that is far more advanced than
anything that is commercially available....?? The only other possibility
is that they are monitoring specific phone lines. This would give them the
ability to train the voice software.
If you know any of those key words, I'd appreciate seeing a list. I need
to spice up my conversation. I want to get my money's worth on my taxes.
I just did a simple search on Google using 'NSA Keyword searches'
without the quotes and came up with:
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/23989res20060131.html
HOW THE NSA SEARCHES FOR TARGETS
There are a range of techniques that are probably used by the NSA to
sift through the sea of communications it steals from the world's cables
and airwaves:
* *Keywords.* In this longstanding technique, the agency maintains a
watch list or "dictionary" of key words, individuals, telephone
numbers and presumably now computer IP addresses. It uses that
list to pick out potentially relevant communications from all the
data that it gathers. These keywords are often provided to the NSA
by other security agencies, and the NSA passes the resulting
intelligence "take" back to the other agencies or officials.
According to the law, the NSA must strip out the names and other
identifying information of Americans captured inadvertently, a
process called "minimization." (According to published reports,
those minimization procedures are not being properly observed.) In
the 1990s, it was revealed that the NSA had used the word
"Greenpeace" and "Amnesty" (as in the human rights group Amnesty
International) as keywords as part of its "Echelon" program (see
Echelon
<http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/23989res20060131.html#echelon>).
* *Link analysis.* It is believed that another manner in which
individuals are now being added to the watch lists is through a
process often called "link analysis." Link analysis can work like
this: the CIA captures a terrorist's computer on the battlefield
and finds a list of phone numbers, including some U.S. numbers.
The NSA puts those numbers on their watch list. They add the
people that are called from those numbers to their list. They
could then in turn add the people called from those numbers to
their list. How far they carry that process and what standards if
any govern the process is unknown.
* *Other screening techniques.* There may be other techniques that
the NSA could be using to pluck out potential targets. One example
is voice pattern analysis, in which computers listen for the sound
of, say, Osama Bin Laden's voice. No one knows how accurate the
NSA's computers may be at such tasks, but if commercial attempts
at analogous activities such as face recognition are any guide,
they would also be likely to generate enormous numbers of false hits.
http://www.nsawatch.org/networks.html
*United States - Oasis & Fluent
<http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57318-2001Mar25.html>
*United States intelligence officials have developed two programs which
many experts believe may be used to enhance ECHELON's capabilities.
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/8/17361.html> One of these
programs, Oasis, automatically creates machine-readable transcripts from
television and audio broadcasts. Reports indicate that Oasis can also
distinguish individual speakers and detect personal characteristics
(such as gender) then denote these characteristics in the transcripts it
creates. The other program, FLUENT, allows English-language keyword
searches of non-English materials. This data mining tool not only finds
pertinent documents, but also translates them, although the number of
languages that can currently be translated is apparently limited
(Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Korean and Ukrainian). In
addition, FLUENT displays the frequency with which a given word is used
in a document and can handle alternate search term spellings.
I haven't found any specific words or terms beyond the obvious but you
would expect them to change rapidly. I should imagine that anyone
discussing current news events would be suspect given that many if not
most Americans do not read newspapers or follow what is going on except
for Paris Hilton, et al.
I am sure that Neil Schneider is on their 'watch' list.
Cheers!
Rick
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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