[CQ-Contest] Fort Meade Relents - Voice Skimmer Released

[N4ZR]

73, Pete N4ZR
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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?"