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Sunday, May 10, 2015
Time to go back to smoke signals - or church
WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
By Wayne Madsen
05/06/2015
WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
By Wayne Madsen
05/06/2015
Perhaps no other document released as part of Edward Snowden's tranche of classified files says more about the National Security Agency's and its foreign partners trawling phone conversations without either an intelligence or criminally-related predicate more than a UK SECRET STRAP 1 document, dated December 7, 2009, on the speech-to-text (STT) system, code named BYBLOS by NSA.
BYBLOS is also deployed at Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) with a British enhancement called GALE.
The BYBLOS system was pioneered for NSA by the firm BBN Technologies of Boston and refined for GCHQ's use by both BBN and Cambridge University. BBN is owned by Raytheon. Before it was bought by Raytheon in 2009, BBN Technologies Solutions LLC, as it was then known, received seed capital from IN-Q-TEL, the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital firm.
The SECRET STRAP 1 document also states that before NSA used BYBLOS it relied on a version of the now-commercially available DRAGON software for STT use. NSA also initially used a voice search tool developed commercially by Nexidia, Inc., which was called NEXminer.
However, while DRAGON and NEXminer were useful against English- and Spanish-speaking targets, they were useless against what NSA described as "less-commonly-taught languages and dialects found in the Middle East." These languages include Arabic. Pashto, and Farsi. Other high-priority languages for speech-to-text conversion are Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Russian.
An improved BYBLOS system, code named RHINEHART apparently includes improvements in areas of Human Language Technology (HLT) analysis beyond STT, including gender, speaker, phonetic, and dialect recognition, as well as anomaly and speech activity detection. Special source systems that were planned to interface with BYBLOS/RHINEHART are code-named WISPYKNIT and VICTORYUNIFORM. These special sources systems may include a voice recognition-biometrics interface.
The GCHQ document states that GCHQ has developed a database of a special regional UK corpus of English known as NIRAD, or Northern Irish accented speech. There is also a reference to BYBLOS being able to track phone numbers spoken over the phone by "Caribbean drug runners." The GCHQ document was released by the Pierre Omidyar-financed "Intercept" with an entire page on BYBLOS error rates redacted by the so-called "independent" media operation.
Meet up at a Belfast pub and know that GCHQ and NSA have tracked your mobile calls to arrange for the rendezvous. But, it's all in the name of "national security."
However, it is a table showing the frequency of spoken word intercepts by GCHQ of Northern Ireland communications that reveals that GCHQ and its NSA partners are obviously monitoring nothing more than Northern Irish residents making plans to meet up at their local pubs.
As seen from the SECRET table, the word "fucking" has a large 204 frequency count along with "yeah," "hello," "right," and "know." So, if you are ever in Belfast and phone a guy named Craic about going to the pub Friday to get meet Sean and get drunk but you only have twenty quid to spend on drinking until at least twelve o'clock until starting a new fucking job Monday, be assured that GCHQ and NSA are listening in and recording everything you say.
No joking! And it is a big nightmare!
Perhaps NSA has had to establish its "Coping with Information Overload office" within its R6 Research Directorate because its systems are recording too many mobile calls about Craicand Sean getting drunk during marathon drinking binges at pubs in Belfast and Derry.
The best solution for NSA is to "end it, don't mend it."
Wayne Madsen
Investigative
journalist, author and syndicated columnist, Madsen has over twenty years
experience in security issues.
As
a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs
for the U.S. Navy. Madsen has been a frequent political and national security
commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC
and MS-NBC. He has been invited to testify as a witness before the US House of
Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism
investigation panel of the French government. A member of the Society of Professional
Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club, Madsen is based and reports from
Washington, D.C.
Posted in: "Mainstream Media" Cover-Ups,"Mainstream Media" Lies,Bogus Spy Cases,Bogus War On Terror,GCHQ,NSA Black Ops,NSA Scum,Obama Criminal Regime,Wayne Madsen
