The Conspiracy is in Your Head

Why ECHELON doesn't exist

from JoeUser Forums

 

 

(Disclaimer : This is only my personal opinion and in no way reflects the official position of the US Army or Government)

 

            Some time ago I stumbled across a few articles referring to something called ECHELON, for those of you who have never heard of it ECHELON is supposed to be a vast computer and intelligence network that monitors and records every email, telephone call, and fax communication in the civilized world. Ostensibly this is done at the whim and behest of the United States Government and it’s allies. I will not categorically state that there is no ECHELON system as it is quite simply impossible to prove that something does not exist. This very fact is what allows conspiracy theorists, ufologists, and psychics to thrive at all. I will go into some reasons why I believe the network does not exist however.

            Let us start with a brief scenario in which ECHELON does in fact exist and is being used to survey an average German city say… Wiesbaden for instance. A quick bit of googling tell me that Weisbaden’s population is roughly 270,000. Let us assume for the moment that on average over the course of a day the time spent on the telephone is 30 seconds per person. I would say that is likely to be a *very* conservative estimate. This would generate a grand total of 2250 *hours* of conversation each and every day. Take that out to a year and the total is roughly 821,250 hours of conversation which for the most part would be in German.

            We will work with the daily total first. Assuming you have a native speaker listening to these conversations, (not someone who was taught the language), also assuming that this native speaker is a very efficient transcriptionist (at a rate of 1 minute of conversation being transcribed real time), and assuming further that they are a genius at moving the fully transcribed conversation into a formatted report that *all* intelligence databases require (say it takes them another 20 seconds per minute of conversation), we come up with one analyst processing one minute of conversation in 80 seconds. To process one day of Wiesbaden’s telephone conversations would require 180,000 man-hours. If you have 18,000 of these wunder-kind transcribers working for you 10 hours a day. You could keep up with the demand of this one city in terms of *transcription* only. I will not even begin to delve into the time it would require to analyze this mountain of data after the process of putting them into data-readable formats is done.

            The above example of course was so ridiculously conservative in it estimates that the true number of staff this feat would require in the real world staggers the mind. Real transcription times are closer to 5 minutes of transcription per minute of conversation and another 2 minutes per for formatting as well. Which is assuming you have available native language speakers available to do the work which is simply fallacy.

            This article only scratches the surface of this issue and I will address it further in later posts.
4,682 views 19 replies
Reply #1 from JoeUser Forums Top
Um... I assume if the government has the ability to monitor all those conversations, it has computers with the simple software necessary to translate spoken word into searchable text.

Of course, the whole idea that the government does is totally preposterous, but with computers the creation of a searchable worldwide database of all communications would be simple, requiring only the IT guys needed to keep the computers online.
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
Man do the math even for this imaginary computer driven task.... Let alone translating the spoken word into text is *terribly* difficult. You have to teach the software each individual voice for it to work with *any* reliablity *and* that is assuming the language is English! Computeers are no where even *close* to acheiveing workable transcritions, beleive me I wish they were. My life would be much much easier if I could replace Pseudosoldier with a linguist-ex-machina.
Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top
No... my point is that if hypothetically the government has the power to tap every single phone line, and track every e-mail, then it should be small fry to translate spoken word to text.
Reply #4 from JoeUser Forums Top
I agree - my apologies for not reading your comments closely enough. Sometimes the spoken word is hard for me to read witht he intended tone :)
Reply #5 from JoeUser Forums Top
Of course. There are always fundamental problems with a medium where the only communication between people is written words. Emoticons can sometimes help that, but it is often too easy to misinterpret what someone said.
Reply #6 from JoeUser Forums Top
Dave - if it was "trivial" we wouldn't be typing this on a keyboard now would we? Whenever I see your software appear in a Gov't intel installation to do this "trivial" task I will give your post credence. Until then I will simply regard it as compost.
Reply #7 from JoeUser Forums Top
Look man, my logic is this : If it were reliable and easy everyone would do it. Thats free market economics for you. Since people do not do it it is neither easy or reliable. Period. If you will simply include the link to your "trivial" version of the "trivial" software I will recant and call you a programming God. Until you can produce the program to translate perfect German with no voice training I will just have to wait for that "keyboardless computer" that will surely be forthcoming from Gateway anyday now.

For the record I didn't call you any names I just called your post compost. Which it was and still is.
Reply #8 from JoeUser Forums Top
Of course. There are always fundamental problems with a medium where the only communication between people is written words. Emoticons can sometimes help that, but it is often too easy to misinterpret what someone said.


Not to troll or anything grey, but I believe this was the subject of your original post, wasn't it?

Anyway...Dave, I'm going to have to side with grey on this one. Language is his job...and I'm pretty sure that if there WERE any really reliable programs out there, the military would have got their sweaty little hands on them and be utilizing them by now.
Reply #9 from JoeUser Forums Top
In the interest of fair I did go and google as suggested, what I found was a massive proliferation of "standards" for speech-to-text programs that have not seen implementation. Also found lots of text-to-speech readers in *english* and none even suggested that they were accurate. Dragon Naturally Speaking seems to be the most accurate *english* 'text to speech' bit out there and even it doesn't claim enough reliability to use in intelligence. Additionally the cheapest Dragon come is around 650.00 USD not so trivial... especially for something that is only partly accurate.
Reply #10 from JoeUser Forums Top
OK, I'll weigh in on this one... Going to have to side with Dave on it, Greywar, sorry. I was actually on the phone recently with a computer that could understand my questions and answers, so long as I stayed within the conversational parameters. For a computer to be programmed to recognize certain speech wave patterns (words like om-bay, uclear-nay, etc ) and flag them for closer inspection is certainly doable, especially for a computer owned by a major government. And these computers can scan conversations MUCH faster than they are spoken. I'll bet they can even recognize ig-pay atin-lay!
Now, do I think we do collect on all conversations? Of course not. That would be against the law. :-)
Reply #11 from JoeUser Forums Top
I agree that there are limited use speech recogniton apps out right now Arq, What I disagree with is a computers ability to do transcription with *any* reliability. You said it yourself, the system you talked to was willing to accept large quantities of possible error due to the *extremely* limited areas of conversation. If you get anywhere near it's dialogue options it just guesses and hopes it gets it right, additionally this is in *english* there has been incomparably more research done on the nuances of English and it's uses in tech areas than any other language. The gap is so great as to make any comparison meaningless. Yet even with that massive gap the technology is *still* not out there to do the things I listed out in *english* even.
Reply #12 from JoeUser Forums Top
I've actually had the opportunity to play with Dragon Naturally Speaking (took a class on ADA computer apps). It took a week of "training" to get the software to recognize and reliably translate one of our voices. Throw in an unfamiliar voice and the program was lost. The program did well after training, but it takes time.
Reply #13 from JoeUser Forums Top
now THAT is a long post.
Reply #14 from JoeUser Forums Top
No, now that is spam.... I knew I recognized your posts from somewhere St. Hubbins... Welcome to "El Blacklisto." Spam a page onto a blog that is not your own and you will pay for it son....
Reply #15 from JoeUser Forums Top
I have read a few news stories related to this subject. The gist of them were that the system, made up of literally thousands of computers, keys on certain words and flags those emails and conversations for analysis. I have no idea of the specifics of the software involved, but I can well imagine it's possible with sufficient resources.

As to the conspiracy being in my head....how do you know this? Have you been spying on me again? Who's in on this with you?
Reply #16 from JoeUser Forums Top
Just me and the other voices:) And you are correct MasonM email is *far* more prone to monitoring than conversation (it is already transcribed). Conversation monitoring would certainly be possible if the entire planet devoted massive resources towards this goal cooperativly... Let me give you just one reason more why they have neve done so... Look at the political capital there was to be won or lost in the Siege of Fallujah... How much would Bush have gained by loacting the leaders in that city (who have cell phones) and killing them ending the rebellion? Tons of political credibility would have been had and if ECHELON or *anything* remotely similar existed Fallujah would be a ridiculously small target for it, no where near as challenging as even my Wiesbaden scenario, yet we couldn't do it no matter how much it was worth it to us. If the means were available they would be used *daily*. They are not used and therefore the lieklyhood of their existance is very small based on that assumption *alone* not even consdiering the host of other factors involved. So while the "Bush knew" folks ninny-on and on about Government Conspiracy, the government itself seems to be unable to utilize the tools that these peopl assume it has. It just doesn't hold water folks, none.
Reply #17 from JoeUser Forums Top
Allow me to add my apology to any reading this for allowing myself to be trolled. I should have recognized the trolsl other posts from conspiracy articles. I would have allowed him to stay if he could have stuck with comments of reasonable length but he chose to spam a page-long diatribe with numerous badlt sourced links in it (www.conspiracyplanet.com is *not* research). Should anyone ever feel the need to point out a larrge quantity of info on my blog, please post a short and concise comment with a link to a article on *your* blog. This blog is mine and I choose to not allow that sort of thing in my comment blocks.
Reply #18 from JoeUser Forums Top
As this topic (sort of) came up in conversation with a friend of my wife, I searched out this article. I was a bit befuddled at how the comments read until I realized that grey had removed some comments of an offending poster.
I also notice the "I will address it in further posts" with dismay, as I don't think you have the inclination any more.
Reply #19 from JoeUser Forums Top
Echelon is real - the Australian SIS head admitted its existence a couple of years back. A NZ researcher also broke into an Echelon unmanned listening post and videotaped the interior computer complex - I think he's serving time in maximum security at the moment. Most of the material is sent to the US for analysis, and it works (or rather, sort of works) through recognition of keywords in text and occasionally voice. Probably only a thousandth max of the material with keywords makes it to real analysts; the rest is just dumped. Some members of the Australian government were worried about the US's use of it for commercial purposes (for example so that AT&T could undercut Telstra on an Indonesian telecomms network) but that seems to have died down now.

It does exist, it's just I doubt it's as efffective as some would claim. Allegations about echelon, and more fully the ASIS head's comments and the NZ researcher's thoughts can be seen on the Sunday program of 23 May 1999. I haven't been able to find a transcript for the program, but the STOA report it's based on is here Link.