Thursday, November 29, 2007
DIGREVO TO AID IN LANGUAGE DECODING
In an article written for Red Herring magazine, a business and technology paper,it is stated that the US Pentagon has enlisted three technology companies to develop software that will decode Islamic languages and aid the US in its war on terror.
"The ultimate goal of the endeavor, dubbed GALE for Global Autonomous Language Exploitation, is to turn the staggeringly large volumes of recorded foreign language broadcasts, phone conversations, and Internet traffic into something national security analysts, spooks, and soldiers can actually use. "
From reading the article, I found out that there are many who think that the US's inability to understand , and translate the mass amount of information they uncover about Islamic terrorist activities, the war on terror has been an even harder one to fight. According to the article companies that include IBM, SRI, and BBN will be given 50 million dollars to develop the software over a two year period. I think that this is a reasonable investment being made by the Pentagon. It is important to know what your enemies next move is and if the amount of evidence they has supposedly gotten there hands on is as much as they see, translating all of this can be a tiresome and time consuming process. Enlisting top technological companies at the cutting edge of the digital revolution is a smart way to get the job done. These are the leaders of the digital revolution and therefore that would be very successful in developing a machine or software described above.
what I would also like to point out is that something like this could be used by the government to violate the rights of legal US citizens, who just happen to speak several languages. They could have their hardware scanned and there words flipped around against them. The development of this type of machine or software is good for the war on terror, but it could start a war at home against people the government should be protecting and not fighting.
"The ultimate goal of the endeavor, dubbed GALE for Global Autonomous Language Exploitation, is to turn the staggeringly large volumes of recorded foreign language broadcasts, phone conversations, and Internet traffic into something national security analysts, spooks, and soldiers can actually use. "
From reading the article, I found out that there are many who think that the US's inability to understand , and translate the mass amount of information they uncover about Islamic terrorist activities, the war on terror has been an even harder one to fight. According to the article companies that include IBM, SRI, and BBN will be given 50 million dollars to develop the software over a two year period. I think that this is a reasonable investment being made by the Pentagon. It is important to know what your enemies next move is and if the amount of evidence they has supposedly gotten there hands on is as much as they see, translating all of this can be a tiresome and time consuming process. Enlisting top technological companies at the cutting edge of the digital revolution is a smart way to get the job done. These are the leaders of the digital revolution and therefore that would be very successful in developing a machine or software described above.
what I would also like to point out is that something like this could be used by the government to violate the rights of legal US citizens, who just happen to speak several languages. They could have their hardware scanned and there words flipped around against them. The development of this type of machine or software is good for the war on terror, but it could start a war at home against people the government should be protecting and not fighting.
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A very good post, good quotation.
The problem that intelligence agencies have is that there is an ocean of data to analyze. They need software systems that will allow them to sift through all of this data to really make intelligence gathering pay off.
GALE sounds like an important piece of this intelligence gathering arsenal. You are right to be concerned that it could be used for domestic surveillance.
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The problem that intelligence agencies have is that there is an ocean of data to analyze. They need software systems that will allow them to sift through all of this data to really make intelligence gathering pay off.
GALE sounds like an important piece of this intelligence gathering arsenal. You are right to be concerned that it could be used for domestic surveillance.
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