[24332] in Cypherpunks
Re: NSA's text search algorithm
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ian Farquhar)
Mon Dec 19 18:20:10 1994
From: "Ian Farquhar" <ianf@sydney.sgi.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 1994 09:58:19 -0500
In-Reply-To: rishab@dxm.ernet.in
"NSA's text search algorithm" (Dec 20, 2:33am)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
On Dec 20, 2:33am, rishab@dxm.ernet.in wrote:
> Subject: NSA's text search algorithm
> "Ian Farquhar" <ianf@sydney.sgi.com>:
> > I always imagined that the development of [NSA's text scanning]
> > algorithm itself predated email, and started back with cable and
> > telex traffic.
>
> Stat text scanning is ancient, but has probably not been used on the scale
> and efficiency that the NSA would require for net traffic.
>
> > > Earlier this year, the agency began soliciting collaborations from
> > > business to develop commercial applications of their technique.
> >
> > Has anyone got any further information about how this algorithm works?
> > It sounds like Rishab has somewhat better info than was publicly
> If you read NSA's note carefully, you easily rule out
> NLP ("independent of...language") and sophisticated neural nets ("very
fast").
You can rule out both of them on the grounds that the original release
claimed that it was ammendable to hardware implementation. I speculated
some clever form of CAM plus stats engine.
Ian.
