Spyboys Go Web 2.0

Last week, the New York Times and some civil lib­er­tar­i­ans got all grossed out by a gov­ern­ment plan to mon­i­tor the for­eign press for its opin­ions of America. “It is just creepy and Orwellian,” Lucy Dalglish, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said.
So no one tell Lucy about this sys­tem keep­ing tabs on over­seas TV chan­nels, 24/​7, for the mil­i­tary, ok? She’s liable to get real upset.
BBN Technologies’ Broadcast Monitoring pro­gram pumps a TV chan­nel — Al-​​Jazeera, say — through a set of servers, which do a quick-​​and-​​dirty tran­scrip­tion of the audio into Arabic text. Then, that text is ported into English.
The ini­tial results are some­thing short of Berlitz. “Did not pro­fes­sional back­ground polit­i­cal motive for fight­ing veil as might be intro­duc­tion,” was the inter­pre­ta­tion for one recent Al-​​Jazeera news snip­pet. But it’s good enough for key­word searches, or to give human trans­la­tors the heads-​​up when there’s some­thing rel­e­vant hap­pen­ing.
A quick search for “Saddam trial,” at yesterday’s Association of the United States Army con­ven­tion, pro­duced 43 hits from the last week of Al-​​Jazeera cov­er­age. (The sys­tem keeps 90 days’ worth of TV on its hard drive.) Click on any of those hits, and you instantly get the Arabic text, the English text, and the video seg­ment. It’s like TiVo for spies — with a tran­scrip­tion ser­vice built in.
A mil­i­tary psy­ops task force in Iraq is already using the sys­tem, accord­ing to BBN’s Martha Lillie. So is U.S. Central Command head­quar­ters in Tampa, Florida, and the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. The Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, cur­rently sta­tioned at Iraq’s Balad Air Base, is next in line.
All of these groups are using the sys­tems (which go for any­where from $110,000 to $190,000 per chan­nel) for pretty much the same thing: track what the for­eign press is say­ing about the U.S. It’s part of a larger effort in the gov­ern­ment to stop rely­ing quite so much on snitches and mega-​​expensive spy satel­lites — and start pay­ing more atten­tion to so-​​called “open source intel­li­gence.” Stuff out in the pub­lic sphere, in other words. “Perhaps our best source of infor­ma­tion is the tele­vi­sion,” Rear Adm. Ronald Henderson, deputy direc­tor of oper­a­tions for the Joint Staff, recently noted.
And while that may give some peo­ple the willies, it sure sounds like a good idea to me. We know jihadists are using every­thing from Hotmail to YouTube to Al-​​Jazeera to spread their mes­sages, and do their busi­ness. Why not track them out in the open? Think of it as the Web 2.0 approach to spy­ing: Let the bad guys sup­ply the intel for us; we’ll just make the connections.

October 12th, 2006 | Cloak and Dagger, You can run... | 214810 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/10/12/spyboys-go-web-2-0/Spyboys+Go+Web+2.02006-10-12+20%3A33%3A54jason You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.