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From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com> To: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com> Cc: Udhay Shankar N <udhay@pobox.com>, cryptography@c2.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 17:24:46 -0500 Message-Id: <19991202222451.A964A41F16@SIGABA.research.att.com> In message <v04210100b46c3822f6c2@[24.218.56.92]>, "Arnold G. Reinhold" w= rites: >>In April 1999, a report commissioned by the Parliament's Office of >>Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA), concluded that >>"effective voice 'wordspotting' systems do not exist" and "are not in u= se". > = > I wonder about the European Parliament. They sometimes make our = > Congress look intelligent. The existence of speech recognition = > technology is hardly a secret. It's been on the market for years, has = > been improving steadily and is now being offered commercially for = > similar applications. I don't know how effective it is right now at = > telephone monitoring, but it will only get better. Here is an excerpt = > from one vendor's web site: = > http://www.dragonsystems.com/products/audiomining/ > = > "New AudioMining=81 Technology Uses Award-Winning Speech Recognition = > Engine to Quickly Capture and Index Information Contained in Recorded = > Video Footage, Radio Broadcasts, Telephone Conversations, Call Center = > Dialogues, Help Desk Recordings, and More etc. The problem, from the perspective of an intelligence agency, is figuring = out = what to listen to. Let's do some arithmetic. The product you cite requires at least a 133 Mhz Pentium; 200 Mhz preferr= ed. = How many such chips are needed? Well, according to a map on a wall near = my = office (see http://www.telegeography.com/Publications/cmap99.html), there= are = currently about 150 Gbps worth of fiber across the Atlantic. That's abou= t 2.7 = potential million phone channels. A lot of that is data, of course -- sh= all = we say 75%? That still leaves us with ~675K simultaneous calls. That's = an = awful lot of CPU power, even by NSA's standards. And it gets worse -- within a year, the FLAG and TAT-14 cables will come = online, adding at least 800 Gbps of capacity... Tentative conclusion: they need to listen to the signaling channels, so = that = they can focus their efforts. *Then* they can do the voice recognition a= nd = pattern-matching tricks. --Steve Bellovin
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