73, Pete N4ZR
Check out the Reverse Beacon Network
at <http://reversebeacon.net>, now
spotting RTTY activity worldwide.
For spots, please use your favorite
"retail" DX cluster.
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?"
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