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

[Tad Danley]

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 at mailman.qth.net
> Message delivered to tdanley at centurylink.net
>
> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html