OK...where to start.
I have been reading-up on the technology that allows the NSA to spy on you and me. I started with who got contracts and what universities/professors were working with them.
Here are some conferences that deal with some of the tech.
2005 International Conference
on Intelligence Analysis
Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence
So... now I am really paranoid
DARPA and the NSA have been looking for a
Voice Recognition Systems for a long time. Speech to text software is an amazing tool. We all know that the HD space needed to keep every call is astronomical as a mp3, but as a txt...
GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) was set up in 2005.
The goal of the GALE program is to develop and apply computer software technologies to absorb, analyze and interpret huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages. Automatic processing ?engines? will convert and distill the data, delivering pertinent, consolidated information in easy-to-understand forms to military personnel and monolingual English-speaking analysts in response to direct or implicit requests.
GALE will consist of three major engines: Transcription, Translation and Distillation. The output of each engine is English text.
So who would be needed for a program like this. Well, a Linguistic for one, would be needed for sure. I believe Christopher Cieri was the man for the job. He works/ed at University of Pennsylvania and published many papers from there.
So they arn't listening they are reading your phone calls. English is much easier to transcribe into English than chinese or Arabic is.
My Mind to Your Mind
developing automated means for digesting the enormous volumes of information generated in multiple languages all over the world. In the Arab speaking world, there are scores of radio stations, television
stations, newswires, and web sites producing hundreds of hours of audio and megabytes of text every day.
So we know they have direct access to AT&T a direct copy of the data stream goes to the NSA. The NSA transcribes your call...you are not a terrorist...do they delete it or do they create another data-base?
some cool links
cim3 lots of cool information.
Directory of Language and Speech Technology Experts
military-information-technology
What ever happened to MIT's GIA(government information analysis) The site doesn't exist anymore but you can read about it here Wired news It is a great idea and someone needs to start it back up.
The premise of GIA is that if the government has a right to know battle about citizens, then citizens have a right to similar information about the government.
GIA was inspired by the federal government's Terrorist Information Awareness, or TIA, program. ...
"Our goal is develop a technology which empowers citizens to form their own intelligence agency; to gather, sort and act on information they gather about the government,"
