Surveillance Technology for Scanning Voice and Text

Earlier today I wrote about issues around eavesdropping on Skype calls. The AP story I cited touched on a topic I've followed a little in the past. The story mentions "broad eavesdropping that the National Security Agency is reputed to be performing, in which it scans thousands or millions of calls at a time for certain phrases."

This kind of surveillance is described in this Boston Globe article: "Wiretaps said to sift all overseas contacts." The key idea is that government agencies are using artificially intelligence technologies to scan voice calls and emails for key words, phrases and patterns to identify possible terrorist communications. One expert quoted in the Globe article says the NSA's systems are able to process "2 million pieces of communications an hour."

The first time I became aware of this kind of technology was at conference in the late 90s at a location that ironically no longer exists because of the 9/11 attacks. I had a long conversation at an expo booth with a rep from a company called Aptex, a subsidiary of HNC, a technology company later acquired by Fair Isaac.

Aptex was marketing a 'text mining' technology that could be used to target web advertising at a user based on intelligent scanning of web documents being viewed by that user. Aptex's technology was based on artificially intelligent neural networks that could 'understand' the content of a text document. The Aptex rep told me that the technology had originally been developed in connection with government contracts for intelligent surveillance of text communications. (He might have told me that he really should kill me after telling me that. Or maybe not.)

Here's an interesting article from the National Science Foundation related to this topic: "Data Mining and Homeland Security Applications."

This kind of technology scares a lot of people because of privacy concerns and the potential for government abuse. That might be a legitimate concern, but its use is also rooted in a desire to use technology innovations to stay ahead of the bad guys -- see "Govt Surveillance: Part of a Taller Wall?"

AB -- 2/16/06