May I post this in your name in my comuter privacy digest? I got this from a source here on campus. Do I have your permission? ---------------------------------+----------------------------------------- Leonard P. Levine | Moderator of Computer Privacy Digest and Professor of Computer Science | comp.society.privacy. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | Post: comp-privacy@uwm.edu Box 784, Milwaukee WI 53201 | Information: comp-privacy-request@uwm.edu ---------------------------------+----------------------------------------- Craig McKie muttered something about...
From owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Thu Feb 3 19:52:39 1994 From: cmckie@ccs.carleton.ca (Craig McKie) Message-Id: <9402040124.AA03270@superior.YP.nobel> Subject: Canadian voice recognition article To: cypherpunks@toad.com Date: Thu, 3 Feb 94 20:24:59 EST X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Spy Agency works on eavesdropping device for phones, faxes New snoop gadget would identify voices carried through air The Canadian Press Used on page 1, Ottawa Citizen, Monday January 31, 1994 An elite wing of Canada's spy agency is secretly developing devices that can monitor and identify voices carried through the air by phone, fax and radio signals, according to a broadcast report citing government documents. The Communications Security Establishment is a super-secret branch of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that specializes in gathering signals intelligence - SIGINT to insiders. Since 1989, the CSE has awarded three contracts worth $1.1 million to a Montreal firm to make machines that can quickly isolate key words and phrases from the millions of signals the CSE monitors each day, CTV reported Sunday. In May 1983, the CSE awarded the Centre de Recherche Informatique de Montreal a contract to develop a "speaker identification system," which can pick voices from the electronic haze and identify them. "Its frightening," says Bill Robinson, a researcher with the peace group, Project Ploughshares. "It has Orwellian potential to sweep through everybody's conversations. As computers get faster and faster, theoretically, one would be able to keep records of all conversations." The CSE is supposed to provide the federal government with foreign intelligence, but parliamentarians have often voiced concerns about the agency's potential to violate the privacy of Canadians. Liberal MP Derek Lee, the head of a Commons committee that oversees Canada's spy agency, said the CSE is overstepping its mandate. "Have they been asked, or have they decided for themselves to take on a new role that requires them to analyse the human voice? And if they have, they've gone beyond what I think they've told us." The CSE is accountable to Parliament through the defence minister. But Defense Minister David Colonette told CTV her was unaware of the CSE's latest electronic snooping projects. "This is the first I've heard of this," Collenette said. "It is certainly something I'll discuss with my officials." While in Opposition, the Liberals pledged to make the CSE more accountable. With a budget of about $250 milliojn and more than 800 employees the CSE operates out of a building on Heron Road in Confederation Heights surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Its work is considered so sensitive that employees are told not to take commercial flights, in case the plane is hijacked and they are held hostage. -- e x t r a p o l a t e steve j. white _____________________________________________________________________________ Gort, klatu barada nicto. aragorn@csd4.csd.uwm.edu