Forwarded From: Putrefied Cow <waste@zor.hut.fi>
Originally From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
Originally To: cypherpunks@toad.com
High-tech snooping tools developed for spy agency
The Vancouver Sun (May 24, 1999)
Jim Bronskill Southam Newspapers
OTTAWA -- Canada's electronic spy agency is quietly bankrolling the
development of cutting-edge systems that can identify voices, analyze
printed documents and zero in on conversations about specific topics.
Documents show the Communications Security Establishment has enlisted the
help of several leading Canadian research institutes to devise
state-of-the-art snooping tools.
CSE, an agency of the defence department, collects and processes
telephone, fax and computer communications of foreign states, corporations
and individuals. The federal government uses the intelligence gleaned from
the data to support troops abroad, catch terrorists and further Canada's
economic goals.
CSE and counterpart agencies in the United States, Britain, Australia and
New Zealand share intercepted communications of interest with one another,
effectively creating a global surveillance web, according to intelligence
experts.
CSE's interest in high-tech devices that help locate specific
conversations and documents is a clear indication the five-member alliance
collects and sifts large volumes of civilian traffic, said Bill Robinson,
a researcher in Waterloo, Ont., who has long studied the spy agencies.
"This technology is needed to process vast communications streams when
you're hunting for nuggets within it."
Robinson said the devices have legitimate uses, but hold "potentially
frightening" implications for people's privacy as the technology advances.
The Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, located at
Concordia University in Montreal, received $355,000 to develop two systems
for CSE that automatically analyze printed documents, such as faxes, once
they are digitally captured in a computer data bank.
The first system, completed early last year, quickly determines the
language of a document, said the centre's C. Y. Suen.
"Some humans may have problems in distinguishing Spanish from Portuguese,
for example, or Spanish from Italian," he said. "So what we have developed
is a system that can do it automatically."
The second device electronically searches captured documents for distinct
features, including logos, photos, text or signatures.
Combining the two systems enables a user, for example, to search a data
bank for Japanese documents containing photos, or Russian faxes with
signatures.
Records obtained by Southam News under the Access to Information Act show
CSE commissioned several other projects during the last two years. They
include:
- An $84,981 contract with the University of Waterloo in Ontario for the
"development of multilingual computer speech recognition systems."
- A $115,000 agreement with the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi to
research "speaker identification" procedures.
- Work by the Centre de Recherche Informatique de Montreal on "topic
spotting" -- a means of identifying the subject of a conversation. The
$150,393 contract was the most recent of several awarded to CRIM.
CSE spokesman Kevin Mills did not provide information on specific goals of
the projects, but allowed: "In general, any research that we're funding
has some kind of interest for CSE."
The agency has been working on voice and phrase-detection systems for at
least a decade. The documents, however, show the research continues, with
some devices yet to be perfected.
CSE and its four international partner agencies use computers capable of
recognizing intercepted messages containing specified names, addresses,
telephone numbers and other key words or numbers, says a new report on
surveillance technology, by Scottish researcher Duncan Campbell.
However, Campbell found the agencies lack systems for homing in on
conversations featuring particular words.
CSE would have trouble picking out a phone call with the words
"assassination" or "revolution" because the speech recognition systems
developed to date cannot instantly recognize an unknown person's voice
traits.
"The key problem, which is familiar to human listeners, is that a single
word heard on its own can easily be misinterpreted, whereas in continuous
speech the meaning may be deduced from surrounding words," says
Campbell's report.
-=-=-=-=-
Spy agency developing powerful snoop tools
May 24, 1999
By JIM BRONSKILL Southam Newspapers
OTTAWA - Canada's electronic spy agency is quietly bankrolling the
development of cutting-edge systems that can identify voices, analyze
printed documents and zero in on conversations about specific topics.
Documents show the Communications Security Establishment has enlisted the
help of several leading Canadian research institutes to devise
state-of-the-art snooping tools.
CSE, an agency of the Defence Department, collects and processes
telephone, fax and computer communications of foreign states, corporations
and individuals. The federal government uses the intelligence gleaned from
the data to support troops abroad, catch terrorists and further Canada's
economic goals.
CSE and counterpart agencies in the United States, Britain, Australia and
New Zealand share intercepted communications of interest with one another,
effectively creating a global surveillance web, according to intelligence
experts.
CSE's interest in high-tech devices that help locate specific
conversations and documents is a clear indication the five-member alliance
collects and sifts large volumes of civilian traffic, said Bill Robinson,
a researcher in Waterloo, Ont., who has long studied the spy agencies.
"This technology is needed to process vast communications streams when
you're hunting for nuggets within it."
Robinson said the devices have legitimate uses, but hold "potentially
frightening" implications for people's privacy as the technology advances.
"They'll be able to do things they never could've done in the past."
The Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, located at
Concordia University in Montreal, received $355,000 to develop two systems
for CSE that automatically analyze printed documents, such as faxes, once
they are digitally captured in a computer data bank.
The first system, completed early last year, quickly determines the
language of a document, said the centre's C. Y. Suen.
"Some humans may have problems in distinguishing Spanish from Portuguese,
for example, or Spanish from Italian," he said. "So what we have developed
is a system that can do it automatically."
The second device electronically searches captured documents for distinct
features, including logos, photos, text or signatures.
Combining the two systems enables a user, for example, to search a data
bank for Japanese documents containing photos, or Russian faxes with
signatures.
Records obtained by Southam News under the Access to Information Act show
CSE commissioned several other projects during the last two years. They
include:
(*) An $84,981 contract with the University of Waterloo in Ontario for the
"development of multilingual computer speech recognition systems."
(*) A $115,000 agreement with the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi to
research "speaker identification" procedures.
(*) Work by the Centre de Recherche Informatique de Montreal on "topic
spotting" - a means of identifying the subject of a conversation. The
$150,393 contract was the most recent of several awarded to CRIM.
CSE spokesman Kevin Mills did not provide information on specific goals of
the projects, but allowed: "In general, any research that we're funding
has some kind of interest for CSE."
The agency has been working on voice- and phrase-detection systems for at
least a decade. The documents, however, show the research continues, with
some devices yet to be perfected.
CSE and its four international partner agencies use computers capable of
recognizing intercepted messages containing specified names, addresses,
telephone numbers and other key words or numbers, says a new report on
surveillance technology, by Scottish researcher Duncan Campbell.
However, Campbell found the agencies lack systems for homing in on
conversations featuring particular words.
For example, CSE would have trouble picking out a phone call with the
words "assassination" or "revolution" because the speech recognition
systems developed to date cannot instantly recognize an unknown person's
individual voice traits.
"The key problem, which is familiar to human listeners, is that a single
word heard on its own can easily be misinterpreted, whereas in continuous
speech the meaning may be deduced from surrounding words," says
Campbell's report.
Montreal's CRIM is trying to get around the problem by devising the "topic
spotting" system, says the report.
In addition, intelligence agencies are using systems that recognize the
"voiceprint" or speech pattern of targeted individuals, though the
technology is not yet fully reliable.
[end]
-o-
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Received on Tue Jun 1 11:20:33 1999