Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!NOTE.NSF.GOV!fbaube From: fbaube@NOTE.NSF.GOV (Fred Baube) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: long-distance monitoring Message-ID: <8804151130.aa03631@note.nsf.gov> Date: 15 Apr 88 16:29:56 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 31 In <48*nat@drao.nrc.cdn> Natalie Prowse writes: > It has recently come to my attention (from a very reliable source), that > long-distance phone calls from Canada to the U.S. are monitored .. > searches for specific keywords .. In _The_Puzzle_Palace_ Bamford asserts that all long-distance communications in and out of the country are indeed monitored, and cites his reasons for asserting this. Crimethinkers have always taken comfort from the fact that there is simply too much traffic for human snoops to completely monitor, but .. Bamford also says that the NSA tries to stay 5 years ahead of the state of the art. The "state of the art" is that machines are very close to recognizing (and so transcribing) connected speech, or at least keywords. Item: several years ago there was an entry in the Commerce Busi- ness Daily asking for a system that could, given a passage of speech, identify the language it was conducted in within 15 seconds. (This is an *unclassified* request, mind you.) Item: in the March 1988 _IEEE_Computer_ is a description of a system for phonemic transcription of connected speech. Is it paranoid or is it prudent to assume that those acres of NSA computers can snatch interesting words out of the ether ? Fred Baube #include /nsa/grep < "assassinate plutonium stealth NRO heroin spam"