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

[Barry]

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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