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

[rjairam at gmail.com]

"Hey Siri, work P5 for me on 160 meters"

Ria
N2RJ

On Tue, 2 Apr 2019 at 14:43, Ron Notarius W3WN via CQ-Contest
<cq-contest at contesting.com> wrote:
>
> Pete,
>
> Your timing was perfect.
>
> I just had to add two pages to my club newsletter at the last minute, and had a hole to fill.
>
> Thanks!
>
> 73
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: CQ-Contest [mailto:cq-contest-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of N4ZR
> Sent: Monday, April 01, 2019 9:19 AM
> To: reflector cq-contest
> Subject: [CQ-Contest] Fort Meade Relents - Voice Skimmer Released
>
> 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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-- 
Ria Jairam, N2RJ
Director, Hudson Division
ARRL - The national association for Amateur Radio™
+1.973.594.6275
https://hudson.arrl.org
n2rj at arrl.org