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Date: 1999-11-23

"Semantic Forests" fuer die NSA


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AUCRYPTO-Moderator Julian Assange hat jene Dokumente
aufgetrieben, die über große Fortschritte beim Übergang vom
Stichwortfiltern zu semantischen Analysen in den Jahren 1996-1998
durch die NSA berichten.

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...
The technology, called "Semantic Forests", is a software program
that analyses voice transcripts and other documents in order to allow
intelligent searching for specific topics. The software could be used
to analyse computer-transcribed telephone conversations. It is
named for its use of an electronic dictionary to make a weighted
"tree" of meanings for each word in a target document.

Two US Department of Defense academic papers, published as part
of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) in 1997 and 1998, provide
the first evidence that the US government has actually built a working
prototype of this technology and is testing it. The papers reveal that
the US military had been honing Semantic Forests over at least two
years, from 1996 to 1998, to make it more effective at siphoning off
useful information.
..
It appears that Semantic Forests is intelligent enough to handle
questions given in plain English. One of the sample questions used
to test the software was, "What have the effects of the UN sanctions
against Iraq been on the Iraqi people, the Iraqi economy, or world oil
prices?"

The US National Security Agency is also closely associated with
Semantic Forests. One of the authors of Semantic Forests, Patrick
Shone, was also one of the inventors of an NSA-patented system for
eavesdropping on international phone calls, which is similar to
Semantic Forests.

The NSA applied for the patent, No 5,937,422, seven months before
the first Semantic Forest paper was delivered at TREC. However, the
patent only became public after winning US Patent Office approval in
August this year.
..
Cryptographer Julian Assange, who moderates the online Australian
discussion forum AUCRYPTO, discovered the department papers
while investigating NSA capabilities. "This is not some theoretical
exercise. The US has actually built and lab tested this technology,
which is clearly aimed at telephone calls. You don't make a wheel
like this unless you have something to put it on," he said.

US Congressman Bob Barr, who previously served with the CIA,
said: "This report underscores the need to update oversight
procedures and legal standards designed in the 1970s and not
updated since, in light of the revolutionary technological changes of
the past two decades. A perfected system to intercept voice
communications and allow government agencies to precisely pinpoint
conversational topics of interest would create a truly awesome
potential for privacy-invading abuses."
..
Dr Brian Gladman, the former director of Strategic Electronic
Communications at the Ministry of Defence, said the NSA would
always like to find better ways to filter "voice traffic"
..
"Automation is essential. It is likely the success rate will be low, but
this may not be an issue. It is better to deploy something that will
allow 10 per cent of the interesting traffic to be found, than doing
nothing and finding nothing."
..
The two Semantic Forests academic papers came from the speech
research branch of the US Department of Defense at Fort Meade,
Maryland – the location of the headquarters of the NSA. When the
1998 paper was downloaded from the TREC conference Internet site,
the name of the file was listed as "nsa-rev.pdf".

Bruce Schneier, the author of Applied Cryptography, claims that,
paired with other types of spying technology, this software could
have a significant impact on people's privacy. "This technology can
be combined with voice-recognition technology to automatically find
certain conversations by a particular person or ethnic group," he
said.

Full Story
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/Digital/Features/spies221199.s html

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published on: 1999-11-23
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