And the best news is NSA is now offering guided tours of their facility
at Ft. Meade!
73,
Tad, K3TD
On 4/1/2019 8:56 AM, Pete Smith N4ZR via PVRC wrote:
Ham Radio News Network has learned that the United States Government
has decided to release into the public domain one of the crown jewels
of the National Security Agency - the Advanced Voice Recognition and
Translation System (AVRTS).
AVRTS has long been rumored to exist, but only recently, after its
disclosure by Wikileaks, did Fort Meade acknowledge its existence. A
spokesman, who declined to be quoted, told HRNN that AVRTS was first
put into service during the aftermath of 9/11, to keep up with
increased terrorist "chatter" on the world cell phone network. He
explained that this posed a substantial challenge to programmers
because of the variation in languages, as well as different accents in
English, the primary language of international communications.
"Fortunately," he said, "unremitting effort over a dozen years has
produced near-perfect transcriptions of virtually any voice and message."
Sources tell HRNN that AVRTS was initially one of the crown jewels of
the U.S. intelligence community, and secrecy was maintained despite
persistent rumors of its existence. In particular, amateur radio
operators (hams) noted the widespread popularity of the CW (Morse
code) Skimmer software developed by a Canadian researcher, and
frequently called for release of similar software for voice
transmissions. Finally, the NSA relented, and beginning today the
software will be available for download from the agency's website. An
agency spokesman elaborated "we are doing this to help phone operators
compete, and hope they will embrace the new technology." He insisted
that ham operators should not be deterred by the size and complexity
of the software - "What's a few terabytes of RAM these days?"
______________________________________________________________
PVRC mailing list
Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/pvrc
Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
Post: mailto:PVRC@mailman.qth.net
Message delivered to tdanley@centurylink.net
This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
_______________________________________________
CQ-Contest mailing list
CQ-Contest@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/cq-contest
|