Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!apollo!nelson_p@apollo.uucp
From: nelson_p@apollo.uucp
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: long distance monitoring
Message-ID: <3b8abbf2.44e6@apollo.uucp>
Date: 18 Apr 88 20:44:00 GMT
Sender: user@apollo.uucp
Lines: 33
To: comp.society.futures@news



>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.

   What does this mean, 'tries to stay 5 years ahead of the state of
   the art'?  It sounds like a contradiction in terms.  Right now 
   there is a a great deal of research going on in speech recognition
   both in academia and in business.  IBM has had a major research
   program in this area for some time.  There's a $bundle to be made in
   this by whoever comes up with something decent, first.   

   Are you saying that everybody is just wasting their time because
   the government can already do this?  And they're too stupid to 
   know it?  Are you saying that the government can keep a secret of 
   this magnitude?  Are you saying that they could attract the research
   talent to pull this off and still keep it quiet?  Also, Bamford's
   book was published in September of 1983.  His info had to be at 
   least a little older than that.  Yet here it is in 1988 and we
   still can't process connected speech of arbitrary speakers with
   much reliability.  And then consider how many tens of thousands
   of overseas voice channels there are.  There are not 1/10th that 
   many Crays in the whole world.  Count me as skeptical.  

                                              --Peter Nelson