The following was posted on the list in the middle of May. Being curious I called the number list at Ft. Meade. The person on who answered was real shaken, for lack of a better term, that I called, it seems that this was the second inquiry that day. He wanted to know various things, like where did I get the information, was my name Bruce.... After a few minutes he finally took my name and said, to call him in a week to 10 days if I did not here from him. A few day later he called and said I needed to send a letter to expressing my interest in the technology. About 10 ten days after that I called to inquire if he received my letter and what was the next step. It seems that there had been quite a few requests and that they were trying to determine whether or not they were going to allow the technology to be transferred to individuals. The person said to call back in 4 or 5 days. I called today and they said in essence that they were not going to let individuals have a shot at it. They said that they were going to charge stiff license fees, that you would need to show a plan of how you were going to develop the product..... You get the point. It is obvious that they really don't want to transfer the technology. And if they do it will be to someone with deep pockets and who they like. I wonder where the fees that they want to charge will go, to the general treasury or to their own budget? More later. Dan Harmon On Thu, 19 May 1994, Anonymous wrote:
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.security,alt.privacy From: schneier@chinet.chinet.com (Bruce Schneier) Subject: "Interesting Stuff" Checkers at the NSA Message-ID: <Cq2934.q0@chinet.chinet.com> Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX Date: Thu, 19 May 1994 17:40:15 GMT
This is from a flyer that NSA people have been distributing:
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY -- TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER
Information Sorting and Retrieval by Language or Topic
Description: This technique is an extremely simple, fast, completely general mathod of sorting and retrieving machine- readable text according to language and/or topic. The method is totally independent of the particular languages or topics of interest, and relies for guidance solely upon exemplars (e.g., existing documents, fragments, etc.) provided by the user. It employs no dictionaries keywords, stoplists, stemmings, syntax, semantics, or grammar; nevertheless, it is capable of distinguishing among closely related toopics (previously considered inseparable) in any language, and it can do so even in text containing a great many errors (typically 10 - 15% of all characters). The technique can be quickly implemented in software on any computer system, from microprocessor to supercomputer, and can easily be implemented in inexpensive hardware as well. It is directly scalable to very large data sets (millions of documents).
Commercial Application:
Language and topic-independent sorting and retieval of documents satisfying dynamic criteria defined only by existing documents.
Clustering of topically related documents, with no prior knowledge of the languages or topics that may be present. It desired, this activity can automatically generate document selectors.
Specializing sorting tasks, such as identification of duuplicate or near-duplicate documents in a large set.
National Security Agency Research and Technology Group - R Office of Research and Technology Applications (ORTA) 9800 Savage Road Fort George G. Meade, MD 20755-6000 (301) 688-0606
If this is the stuff they're giving out to the public, I can only imagine what they're keeping for themselves.
Bruce
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