Echelon computers can't cope with bad lines

'What? Osama bin who? Yes, we sell nukes. Say again?'

Register | February 16, 2010

Who remembers Echelon, the top-secret telecommunications spy network said to be run by the US and allied Anglophone nations, and to be triggered as soon as certain key words or phrases are spoken on the phone?

A lot of you, we'd guess. So it's interesting to note that Pentagon boffins have now stated that perhaps the most intriguing reputed capability of Echelon - the ability to automatically pick out words of interest and flag that conversation up as important to its human masters - doesn't work. Or anyway, it only works on good, clear lines: a noisy or degraded signal frustrates it.

The news comes as part of a solicitation from the Pentagon crazytech bureau, DARPA, in which the maverick military mayhem mavens request assistance with building a Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech (RATS) system. According to DARPA:

Existing transcription and translation and speech signal processing technologies are insufficient for working with noisy or degraded speech signals that are of importance to current and future Department of Defense (DoD) operations. Currently, there is no technological solution [our emphasis] which effectively addresses this kind of noisy and distorted speech signal, so operational units are forced to allocate significant human resources for this task.

Full article here