[CQ-Contest] [PVRC] Fort Meade Relents - Voice Skimmer Released
Barry
w2up at comcast.net
Mon Apr 1 16:01:15 EDT 2019
On a serious note, I visited the NSA's cryptology museum a number of
years ago. It was a very interesting place with a lot of historic
equipment, such as an Enigma machine. If you happen to be in the area,
check it out.
https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/museum/
Barry W2UP
On 4/1/2019 8:19 AM, Tad Danley wrote:
> 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?"
>>
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