>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Date: Wed, 1 Dec 1999 15:18:43 -0500
>To: undisclosed-recipients: ;
>
>CyberWire Dispatch // (c) Copyright 1999 // November 30
>Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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>
>Jacking in from the "Sticks and Stones" Port:
>
>
>By Suelette Dreyfus
>Special Correspondent
>CyberWire Dispatch
>
>"Semantic Forests" doesn't mean much to the average person. But if you say
>it in concert with the words "automatic voice telephone interception" and
>"U.S. National Security Agency" to a computational linguist, you might just
>witness the physical manifestations of the word "fear."
>
>Words are funny things, often so imprecise. Two people can have a telephone
>conversation about sex, without ever mentioning the word. And when the
>artist formerly known as Prince sang a song about "cream," he wasn't
>talking about a dairy product.
>
>All this linguistic imprecision has largely protected our voice
>conversations from the prying ears of governments. Until now.
>
>Or, more particularly, it protected us until 15 April, 1997 - the date the
>NSA lodged a secret patent application at the US Patent Office. Of course,
>the content of the NSA patent was not made public for two years, since the
>Patent Office keeps patent applications secret until they are approved,
>which in this case was August 10, 1999.
>
>What is so worrying about patent number 5,937,422? The NSA is believed to
>be the largest and by far most well-funded spy agency in the world, a
>Microsoft of Spookdom. This document provides the first hard evidence that
>the NSA appears to be well on its way to creating eavesdropping software
>capable of listening to millions of international telephone calls a day.
>Automatically.
>
>Patents are sometimes simply ambit claims, legal handcuffs on what often
>amounts to little more than theory. Not in this case. This is real. The U.S.
>Department of Defense has developed the NSA's patent ideas into a real
>software program, called "Semantic Forests," which it has been lab
>testing for at least two years.
>
>Two important reports to the European Parliament, in 1998 and 1999, and
>Nicky Hager's 1996 book "Secret Power" reveal that the NSA intercepts
>international faxes and emails. At the time, this revelation upset a great
>number of people, no doubt including the European companies which lost
>competitive tenders to American corporations not long after the NSA found
>its post-Cold War "new economy" calling: economic espionage.
>
>Voice telephone calls, however, well, that is another story. Not even the
>world's most technically advanced spy agency has the ability to do massive
>telephone interception and automatically massage the content looking for
>particular words, and presumably topics. Or so said a comprehensive recent
>report to the European Parliament.
>
>In April 1999, a report commissioned by the Parliament's Office of
>Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA), concluded that
>"effective voice 'wordspotting' systems do not exist" and "are not in use".
>
>The tricky bit there is "do not exist". Maybe these systems haven't been
>deployed en masse, but it is looking increasingly like they do actually
>exist, probably in some form which may be closer to the more powerful topic
>spotting.
>
>Do The Math
>============
>
>There are two new pieces of evidence to support this, and added together,
>they raise some fairly explosive questions about exactly what the NSA is
>doing with the millions of international phone calls it intercepts every day
>in its electronic eavesdropping web commonly known as Echelon.
>
>First. The NSA's shiny new patent describes a method of "automatically
>generating a topic description for text and sorting text by topic." Sound
>like a sophisticated web search engine? That's because it is.
>
>This is a search engine designed to trawl through "machine transcribed
>speech," in the words of the patent application. Think computers
>automatically typing up words falling from human lips. Now think of a
>powerful search engine trawling through those words.
>
>Now sweat...
>
>Maybe the spy agency only wants to transcribe the BBC Radio World News, but
>I don't think so. The patent contains a few more linguistic clues about the
>NSA's intent - little golden Easter eggs buried in the legal long grass.
>The "Background to the Invention" section of every patent application is the
>place where the intellectual property lawyers desperately try to waive away
>everyone else's right to claim anything even remotely touching on the
>patent.
>
>In this section, the NSA attorneys observed there has been "growing
>Interest" in automatically identifying topics in "unconstrained speech."
>
>Only a lawyer could make talking sound so painful. "Unconstrained speech"
>means human conversation. Maybe it's been "unconstrained" by the likelihood
>of being automatically transcribed for real time topic searching.
>
>Here's the part where the imprecision of words - particularly spoken words -
>comes in. Machine transcribed conversations are raw, and very hard to
>analyze automatically with software. Many experts thought the NSA couldn't
>go driftnet fishing in the content of everyone's international phone calls
>because the technology to transcribe and analyze those calls was too young.
>
>However, if the NSA didn't have the technology to do automatic transcription
>of speech, why would it have patented a sifting method which, by its very own
>words, is aimed at transcripts of human speech?
>
>As Australian cryptographer Julian Assange, who discovered the DoD and
>patent papers while investigating NSA capabilities observed: "Why make tires
>if you don't have a car? Maybe we haven't seen the car yet, but we can infer
>that it exists by all the tires and roads."
>
>One of the top American cryptographers, Bruce Schneier, also believes the
>NSA already has machine transcription capability. "One of the Holy Grails of
>the NSA is the ability to automatically search through voice traffic,"
>Schneier said. "They would have expended considerable effort on this
>capability, and this research indicates at least some of it has been
>fruitful."
>
>Second, two Department of Defense academic papers show the U.S. developed a
>real software program, called "Semantic Forests," to implement the patented
>method.
>
>Published as part of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) in 1997 and 1998,
>the Semantic Forest papers show the program has one main purpose:
>"performing retrieval on the output of automatic speech-to-text (speech
>recognition) systems." In other words, the U.S. built this software
>*specifically* to sift through computer-transcribed human speech.
>
>If that doesn't send a chill down your spine, read on.
>
>The DoD's second prime purpose for Semantic Forests was to "explore rapid
>Prototyping" of this information retrieval system. That statement was
>written in 1997.
>
>There's also an unambiguous link between Semantic Forests and the NSA
>patent, it's human and its name is Patrick Schone.
>
>Schone appears on the NSA patent documents, as an inventor, and the Semantic
>Forests papers, as an author and he works at Ft. Meade, NSA's headquarters.
>
>Specifically, he works in the DoD's "Speech Research Branch" which just
>happens to be located at, you guessed it, Ft. Meade.
>
>Very Clever Fish
>================
>
>
>The NSA and the DoD refused to comment on the patent or Semantic Forests
>respectively. Not surprising really but no matter, since the Semantic Forest
>papers speak for themselves. The papers reveal a software program which,
>while somewhat raw a year ago, was advancing quickly in its ability to fish
>relevant data out of various document pools, including those based on
>speech.
>
>For example, in one set of tests, the scientists increased the average
>precision rate for finding relevant documents per query from 19% to 27% in
>just one year, from 1997 to 1998. Tests in 1998 on another set of documents,
>in the "Spoken Document Retrieval" pool were turning up similar stats
>around 20-23 per cent. The team also discovered that a little hand-fiddling
>in the software reaped large rewards.
>
>According to the 1998 TREC paper: "When we supplemented the topic lists for
>all the queries (by hand) to contain additional words from the relevant
>documents, our average precision at the number of relevant documents went
>from 28% to 50%."
>
>The truth is that Schone and his colleagues have created a truly clever
>invention. They have done some impressive research. What a shame all this
>creativity and laborious testing is going to be used for such dark,
>Orwellian purposes.
>
>Let's work on the mental image of that dark landscape. The NSA sucks down
>phone calls, emails - all sorts of communications to its satellite bases.
>Its computers sift through the data looking for information which might
>interest the U.S. or, if the Americans happen to be feeling generous that
>day, their allies.
>
>Now, whenever NSA agents want to find out about you, they pull up a slew of
>details about you on their database. And not just the run-of-the-mill
>gumshoe detective stuff like your social security number, address, but the
>telephone number of every person you call regularly, and everything you have
>said when making those calls to 1-900-Lick-Me from your hotel room on those
>stop overs in Cleveland.
>
>And here's the real scary stuff:
>
>The NSA likely already has a file on many of us. It's not a traditional
>manilla file with your name typed neatly on the front. It's the ability to
>reference you, or anyone who matches your patterns of behavior and contacts,
>in the NSA's
>databases. Now, or in the near future, this file may not just include who
>you are, but what you *say*.
>
>British Member of the European Parliament Glyn Ford is one of the few
>politicians around who is truly concerned with the individual's right to
>privacy. A driving force behind the European Parliament's STOA panel's two
>year investigation into electronic communications, Ford is worried that the
>NSA possesses technologies that are "potentially very dangerous" to privacy
>and yet have no controls over their activities.
>
>The Australian aboriginal activist and lawyer Noel Pearson once said that
>that the British gave three great things to the world: tea, cricket and
>common law. If unchecked, the NSA and its sister spy agencies in the UK/USA
>agreement may use this technology to lead an assault on the most important
>of
>those gifts and the common law tenet "innocent until proven guilty" may be
>the
>first casualty.
>
>How ironic: one Blair wrote '1984' as fiction, and another is helping to
>make it fact.
>
>= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
>
>An Australian-American writer, Suelette Dreyfus was educated in the UK
>and US, studied at Oxford University and Columbia University in New York,
>where she won the prestigious Teichmann Prize for excellence and originality
>in writing. She is the author of Underground, the first book about Australian
>computer hacking, available at
>
>= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
>
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