The following web page is about recent projects at the Air Force Research Laboratory. Item 8 is about new wiretap technology, designed to monitor large numbers of conversations for drug activity. The accompanying artwork has a large and small version of a wiretapper logo, which should be possible to abuse for something :-) http://www.afrl.af.mil/accomprpt/may02/accompmay02.htm Google cache: http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:wHZ4vsieDNkC:www.afrl.af.mil/accomprpt/may02/accompmay02.htm+nanosat+2002&hl=en&lr=lang_da|lang_nl|lang_en|lang_fr|lang_de|lang_is|lang_es&ie=UTF-8 Wiretapper Logo: http://www.afrl.af.mil/accomprpt/may02/images/may_8.gif The Information Directorate's Multisensor Exploitation Branch and Research Associates for Defense Conversion (RADC) jointly developed, tested, and demonstrated an experimental model capability that automatically extracts information from telephone background sounds and conversational speech to identify drug networks and the participants. The work, sponsored by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), addresses the problem of monitoring large numbers of telephone conversations for drug activity, while protecting the privacy of citizens in accordance with wiretap laws. The capability called Automated Title Three Audio Correlation (ATTAC) makes it possible to automatically segment and flag drug- related activity and identify its participants without understanding the message content of the conversation. A background sound recognizer technology identifies sounds, such as dial tone, number dialed, ringing, and other sounds, while a Vector Quantization speaker-recognition technology identifies the persons involved in the conversations. The DEA and RADC collected a database of conversations through 74 individuals who made over 1300 calls from cellular phones, and office phones, and who used message machines. The results in identifying the participants in conversational speech varied widely. DEA and RADC technicians obtained good results (90%) when individuals used the same phones; however, when the same individuals used different phones, the performance could drop to as low as 55%. The directorate is conducting research work to improve recognition across multiple phone types. Although the directorate developed ATTAC for DEA use, the technology developed advances the state-of-the-art in speaker segmentation and in information extraction for the Air Force intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission. (Mr. S. E. Smith, AFRL/IFEC, (315) 330-7894)