It’s the LEFT who keep the racism alive!...............

By Joe Messina / 5 May 2015   

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This week, among all the garbage that was going on in Baltimore, we saw something we don’t see very often… a parent taking charge of her teenage child who was going down to where the riots were happening. Once the vandalism started it turned to from protests to riots. But she marched through the crowd not caring about her safety to save her child’s life. God bless that woman!

She was a real hero doing something that we don’t see much of today... a parent saying “no, no way, not my child, not today.” She said she wasn’t going to allow her son to disrespect property, disrespect the police, and destroy the community. She said he promised her he would not go down there! So, as SHE said, he lied and went where he should not have been.

This single mom of 6 children took time off from work to be involved. She said when she saw him with his face covered and a brick in his hand she knew he was up to no good. She grabbed him and started smacking him around (with an OPEN hand.) She told him if he wanted to protest he should be a man, show his face, and do it the right way… using nonviolence. (Remember, all you who love Dr. King – nonviolence.)

She did a good thing. She held her son accountable for his actions!

But did she really? The loons on the Left say “no”! They say what she did was wrong. And now Baltimore child protective services is investigating her out. Their statement, “If she would do this to her son in public, what is she doing to her kids in private?” WHAT?! Are they serious?

Let me see. We have seen many kids punch, even knock out, teachers in classroom situations or on school grounds and that’s them “acting out because of their environment.” We are supposed to make excuses for them and not hold them accountable. But a mom gets physical to ensure her child does not act out criminal behavior and suddenly it’s the end of the world?

The loons don’t like all the positive attention she is getting. In many interviews her son keeps saying he knew what he was doing was wrong and didn’t know his mom cared so much about what he did. WOW! A positive response from the child! We can’t have that, now can we?

Then a psychologist (who happens to be black) on CNN, said that the reason this video and incident was so popular was that white people like to see black kids getting beaten up, especially a black woman beating on a black man! I call B.S… big time.

Hey, loons! You want racism to stop? Stop making everything about racism! In the past I’ve commented on many of the loon stories, you know, like the one where PB&J’s are racist! Really? Is it REALLY racist that rich people can go to better schools than poor people? Or is it because there are more poor black people? Oh, and the latest the war on drugs is a war on black people. Why, you ask? Because there are more black people on drugs than others. Really, isn’t that a racist comment in and of itself?

It never crossed my mind that more blacks were on drugs than whites, Asians, and Latinos until a racist, black attorney brought it up and made my racist white privileged self-aware of the situation!

So, let’s go down that road. Most stories we see on black single moms are usually about how many kids they have by how many baby-daddy’s and how welfare is not giving her the money she needs to raise her children. The Right grabs on and complains how we need to stop supporting this kind of thinking. The Left jumps up and says we aren’t doing enough for the disadvantaged!

What’s confusing is we see an uplifting story about a mom. Now understand, no Conservative writer or commentator I work with used the words “black mother” until the Left made a big deal out of it. She’s not on welfare and she took time off of her job to go take care of her responsibility. Yes, her 16 year-old child, who lied to her, was going down to commit felonies and possibly be injured or killed. She was mad and unashamed enough to smack him around with an open hand, trying to pull his face mask off. God bless this woman. Not this black woman teaching her black, lying son a lesson. God bless this WOMAN teaching her SON a lesson. If you used the word “black” in there, then you sir are the racist!

It’s impossible to placate the Left. These loons want open borders, no rules, total socialism. We can’t hit our kids or hold them responsible. We can’t expect better from them in school or work. We can’t force people to work in any way, whether they be on welfare or in jail. So we can’t demand anything of our citizen and non-citizens, yet they can demand and expect everything from the government via the law-abiding taxpayers.

  

You want equality? Charge the 101 rioters and vandals let go from Baltimore holding because the system was overloaded (more B.S.) Charging the 6 police officers the way they did is nothing more than appeasement, and that’s wrong. Should a police officer be charged? Probably, but I don’t have any of the reports or facts. Let’s allow a special D.A. deal with it.

There is so much about this that stinks, but most of all, the fact that the loons want this woman demonized for striking her child in public is one of the reasons this society is falling apart!

America protect your children, train, and discipline then accordingly – and don’t let the government stop you!

Muslim Terrorist Attack in Texas Stopped by Guns!

By Tim Brown / 5 May 2015  

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The Islamic jihad attack in Garland, Texas at the Inaugural Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest should be held up as an example of one of the many reasons people should be well armed. Compare what took place on Sunday evening here in America to that which took place just months before at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in France. What made the difference in the jihadists meeting their Maker and those in France? Guns.
Keep in mind that in both incidents, Islamic jihadists are at the center of the threat to liberty, free speech and life itself. Also, keep in mind that they are behind many of the advances of the gun confiscation crowd in America, as well.
If you recall, at least two masked Islamists, now known as Cherif and Said Kouachi, were armed with AK-47s. They believed they were on a mission from Allah, according to the teachings of the Koran. Their mission was to slay the infidels who insulted their so-called "prophet."
It was reported that the two opened fire on police, as well as members of the Charlie Hebdo staff.
The total dead was twelve, with seven injured.
"We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad," witnesses said they heard the jihadists scream.
Other attacks also occurred in Paris over the next couple of days.
image: http://cdn1.eaglerising.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/geller-summit-300x193.jpg
The problem for the citizens of France was that they were not armed in order to fend off the attack the Kouachi brothers brought on them. They were victims not only of Islamic jihad, but also of their own government because they had been disarmed.
As a side not, at least some in Australia began to rethink such disarmament after Islamic jihadist Haron Monis somehow acquired a gun, managed to take hostages in a sixteen hour standoff in a Sydney café and murder two of them while injuring several others. Sen. David Leyonhjelm of Australia's Liberal Democratic Party claimed that it was the tyrannical gun laws of Australia that had made a "nation of victims" and called it "unforgivable."
But let's compare what took place at Charlie Hebdo with what occurred on Sunday evening in Garland, Texas. First, consider that in America there are tens of millions, if not more, people who are well armed and know how to use their weapons. They understand that being well armed is vital to the security of a free state, not to mention to defend their own lives and those around them.
As Pamela Geller set forth to push back against the encroaching Sharia we are seeing across the globe and in our own country, she made sure that when she began to promote the event that she had gotten over the top security. That meant having men who were well-trained and well-armed.
Geller, a gutsy lady, decided to host an exhibit and offer a contest in which participants would draw Islam's Muhammad. Most of the drawings were not of the same caliber as Charlie Hebdo. Nevertheless, they did make a point. The event was also held on the same grounds as the "Stand with the Prophet" conference, which took place back in January. You'll recall at that event, which occurred at the same time as Geller's free speech rally, denied access to many reporters.
There is no doubt that Geller and those in attendance knew that a possible attack could come. After all, not only were they giving jihadists the middle finger, but they were in Texas, where reports have been coming in that members of the Islamic State have a camp on the Mexican/Texas border.
Though the two Islamic gunmen were armed and had additional ammunition in their car, neither Elton Simpson nor Nadir Soofi were able to fight off the security that met them and took them down in the streets before they were able to get inside the event and commit mass murder.
Understand that the federal government has known about Simpson for some time and called him a "wannabe" terrorist. They've been tracking him for years. At the same time, this same federal government has been going after American's gun rights. Does anyone else see a problem here?
The thing to keep in mind is not that a police officer was able to take down the jihadists, but the fact that it was a gun used by someone seeking to protect others that prevailed. I'll bet those in the Charlie Hebdo office wished they had been armed that fateful day.
If nothing else, this only proves the point of the NRA's Wayne Pierre, who commented, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

  

Next time an elected official wants to put forward legislation to restrict your ability to acquire, keep or bear arms, remind them of Garland, Texas and then remove them from office.

The Computers are Listening

How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text

By Dan Froomkin

@froomkin

Today at 8:08 AM

    Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.  But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.
Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.
The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.
Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.
The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.
Spying on international telephone calls has always been a staple of NSA surveillance, but the requirement that an actual person do the listening meant it was effectively limited to a tiny percentage of the total traffic. By leveraging advances in automated speech recognition, the NSA has entered the era of bulk listening.
And this has happened with no apparent public oversight, hearings or legislative action. Congress hasn’t shown signs of even knowing that it’s going on.


The USA Freedom Act — the surveillance reform bill that Congress is currently debating — doesn’t address the topic at all. The bill would end an NSA program that does not collect voice content: the government’s bulk collection of domestic calling data, showing who called who and for how long.
Even if becomes law, the bill would leave in place a multitude of mechanisms exposed by Snowden that scoop up vast amounts of innocent people’s text and voice communications in the U.S. and across the globe.
Civil liberty experts contacted by The Intercept said the NSA’s speech-to-text capabilities are a disturbing example of the privacy invasions that are becoming possible as our analog world transitions to a digital one.
“I think people don’t understand that the economics of surveillance have totally changed,” Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told The Intercept.
“Once you have this capability, then the question is: How will it be deployed? Can you temporarily cache all American phone calls, transcribe all the phone calls, and do text searching of the content of the calls?” she said. “It may not be what they are doing right now, but they’ll be able to do it.”
And, she asked: “How would we ever know if they change the policy?”
Indeed, NSA officials have been secretive about their ability to convert speech to text, and how widely they use it, leaving open any number of possibilities.
That secrecy is the key, Granick said. “We don’t have any idea how many innocent people are being affected, or how many of those innocent people are also Americans.”

I Can Search Against It

NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who was trained as a voice processing crypto-linguist and worked at the agency until 2008, told The Intercept that he saw a huge push after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks to turn the massive amounts of voice communications being collected into something more useful.
Human listening was clearly not going to be the solution. “There weren’t enough ears,” he said.
The transcripts that emerged from the new systems weren’t perfect, he said. “But even if it’s not 100 percent, I can still get a lot more information. It’s far more accessible. I can search against it.”
Converting speech to text makes it easier for the NSA to see what it has collected and stored, according to Drake. “The breakthrough was being able to do it on a vast scale,” he said.

More Data, More Power, Better Performance

The Defense Department, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), started funding academic and commercial research into speech recognition in the early 1970s.
What emerged were several systems to turn speech into text, all of which slowly but gradually improved as they were able to work with more data and at faster speeds.
In a brief interview, Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, indicated that the government’s ability to automate transcription is still limited.
Kaufman says that automated transcription of phone conversation is “super hard,” because “there’s a lot of noise on the signal” and “it’s informal as hell.”
“I would tell you we are not very good at that,” he said.
In an ideal environment like a news broadcast, he said, “we’re getting pretty good at being able to do these types of translations.”
A 2008 document from the Snowden archive shows that  transcribing news broadcasts was already working well seven years ago, using a program called Enhanced Video Text and Audio Processing:

(U//FOUO) EViTAP is a fully-automated news monitoring tool. The key feature of this Intelink-SBU-hosted tool is that it analyzes news in six languages, including Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, English, and Farsi/Persian. “How does it work?” you may ask. It integrates Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) which provides transcripts of the spoken audio. Next, machine translation of the ASR transcript translates the native language transcript to English. Voila! Technology is amazing.

A version of the system the NSA uses is now even available commercially.
Experts in speech recognition say that in the last decade or so, the pace of technological improvement has been explosive. As information storage became cheaper and more efficient, technology companies were able to store massive amounts of voice data on their servers, allowing them to continually update and improve the models. Enormous processors, tuned as “deep neural networks” that detect patterns like human brains do, produce much cleaner transcripts.
And the Snowden documents show that the same kinds of leaps forward seen in commercial speech-to-text products have also been happening in secret at the NSA, fueled by the agency’s singular access to astronomical processing power and its own vast data archives.
In fact, the NSA has been repeatedly releasing new and improved speech recognition systems for more than a decade.
The first-generation tool, which made keyword-searching of vast amounts of voice content possible, was rolled out in 2004 and code-named RHINEHART.
“Voice word search technology allows analysts to find and prioritize intercept based on its intelligence content,” says an internal 2006 NSA memo entitled “For Media Mining, the Future Is Now!”
The memo says that intelligence analysts involved in counterterrorism were able to identify terms related to bomb-making materials, like “detonator” and “hydrogen peroxide,” as well as place names like “Baghdad” or people like “Musharaf.”
RHINEHART was “designed to support both real-time searches, in which incoming data is automatically searched by a designated set of dictionaries, andretrospective searches, in which analysts can repeatedly search over months of past traffic,” the memo explains (emphasis in original).
As of 2006, RHINEHART was operating “across a wide variety of missions and languages” and was “used throughout the NSA/CSS [Central Security Service] Enterprise.”
But even then, a newer, more sophisticated product was already being rolled out by the NSA’s Human Language Technology (HLT) program office. The new system, called VoiceRT, was first introduced in Baghdad, and “designed to index and tag 1 million cuts per day.”
The goal, according to another 2006 memo, was to use voice processing technology to be able “index, tag and graph,” all intercepted communications. “Using HLT services, a single analyst will be able to sort through millions of cuts per day and focus on only the small percentage that is relevant,” the memo states.
A 2009 memo from the NSA’s British partner, GCHQ, describes how “NSA have had the BBN speech-to-text system Byblos running at Fort Meade for at least 10 years. (Initially they also had Dragon.) During this period they have invested heavily in producing their own corpora of transcribed Sigint in both American English and an increasing range of other languages.” (GCHQ also noted that it had its own small corpora of transcribed voice communications, most of which happened to be “Northern Irish accented speech.”)
VoiceRT, in turn, was surpassed a few years after its launch. According to the intelligence community’s “Black Budget” for fiscal year 2013, VoiceRT was decommissioned and replaced in 2011 and 2012, so that by 2013, NSA could operationalize a new system. This system, apparently called SPIRITFIRE, could handle more data, faster. SPIRITFIRE would be “a more robust voice processing capability based on speech-to-text keyword search and paired dialogue transcription.”

Extensive Use Abroad

Voice communications can be collected by the NSA whether they are being sent by regular phone lines, over cellular networks, or through voice-over-internet services. Previously released documents from the Snowden archive describe enormous efforts by the NSA during the last decade to get access to voice-over-internet content like Skype calls, for instance. And other documents in the archive chronicle the agency’s adjustment to the fact that an increasingly large percentage of conversations, even those that start as landline or mobile calls, end up as digitized packets flying through the same fiber-optic cables that the NSA taps so effectively for other data and voice communications.
The Snowden archive, as searched and analyzed by The Intercept, documents extensive use of speech-to-text by the NSA to search through international voice intercepts — particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Mexico and Latin America.
For example, speech-to-text was a key but previously unheralded element of the sophisticated analytical program known as the Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG), which started in 2005 when newly appointed NSA chief Keith B. Alexander, according to the Washington Post, “wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency’s powerful computers.”
The Real Time Regional Gateway was credited with playing a role in “breaking up Iraqi insurgent networks and significantly reducing the monthly death toll from improvised explosive devices.” The indexing and searching of “voice cuts” was deployed to Iraq in 2006. By 2008, RTRG was operational in Afghanistan as well.
A slide from a June 2006 NSA powerpoint presentation described the role of VoiceRT: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text/

Keyword spotting extended to Iranian intercepts as well. A 2006 memo reported that RHINEHART had been used successfully by Persian-speaking analysts who “searched for the words ‘negotiations’ or ‘America’ in their traffic, and RHINEHART located a very important call that was transcribed verbatim providing information on an important Iranian target’s discussion of the formation of a the new Iraqi government.” According to a 2011 memo, “How is Human Language Technology (HLT) Progressing?“, NSA that year deployed “HLT Labs” to Afghanistan, NSA facilities in Texas and Georgia, and listening posts in Latin America run by the Special Collection Service, a joint NSA/CIA unit that operates out of embassies and other locations.
“Spanish is the most mature of our speech-to-text analytics,” the memo says, noting that the NSA and its Special Collections Service sites in Latin America, have had “great success searching for Spanish keywords.”
The memo offers an example from NSA Texas, where an analyst newly trained on the system used a keyword search to find previously unreported information on a target involved in drug-trafficking. In another case, an official at a Special Collection Service site in Latin America “was able to find foreign intelligence regarding a Cuban official in a fraction of the usual time.”
In a 2011 article, “Finding Nuggets — Quickly — in a Heap of Voice Collection, From Mexico to Afghanistan,” an intelligence analysis technical director from NSA Texas described the “rare life-changing instance” when he learned about human language technology, and its ability to “find the exact traffic of interest within a mass of collection.”
Analysts in Texas found the new technology a boon for spying. “From finding tunnels in Tijuana, identifying bomb threats in the streets of Mexico City, or shedding light on the shooting of US Customs officials in Potosi, Mexico, the technology did what it advertised: It accelerated the process of finding relevant intelligence when time was of the essence,” he wrote. (Emphasis in original.)
The author of the memo was also part of a team that introduced the technology to military leaders in Afghanistan. “From Kandahar to Kabul, we have traveled the country explaining NSA leaders’ vision and introducing SIGINT teams to what HLT analytics can do today and to what is still needed to make this technology a game-changing success,” the memo reads.

Extent of Domestic Use Remains Unknown

What’s less clear from the archive is how extensively this capability is used to transcribe or otherwise index and search voice conversations that primarily involve what the NSA terms “U.S. persons.”
The NSA did not answer a series of detailed questions about automated speech recognition, even though an NSA “classification guide” that is part of the Snowden archive explicitly states that “The fact that NSA/CSS has created HLT models” for speech-to-text processing as well as gender, language and voice recognition, is “UNCLASSIFIED.” https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text/


Also unclassified: The fact that the processing can sort and prioritize audio files for human linguists, and that the statistical models are regularly being improved and updated based on actual intercepts. By contrast, because they’ve been tuned using actual intercepts, the specific parameters of the systems are highly classified.
“The National Security Agency employs a variety of technologies in the course of its authorized foreign-intelligence mission,” spokesperson Vanee’ Vines wrote in an email to The Intercept. “These capabilities, operated by NSA’s dedicated professionals and overseen by multiple internal and external authorities, help to deter threats from international terrorists, human traffickers, cyber criminals, and others who seek to harm our citizens and allies.”
Vines did not respond to the specific questions about privacy protections in place related to the processing of domestic or domestic-to-international voice communications. But she wrote that “NSA always applies rigorous protections designed to safeguard the privacy not only of U.S. persons, but also of foreigners abroad, as directed by the President in January 2014.”
The presidentially appointed but independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) didn’t mention speech-to-text technology in its public reports.
“I’m not going to get into whether any program does or does not have that capability,” PCLOB chairman David Medine told The Intercept.
His board’s reports, he said, contained only information that the intelligence community agreed could be declassified.
“We went to the intelligence community and asked them to declassify a significant amount of material,” he said. The “vast majority” of that material was declassified, he said. But not all — including “facts that we thought could be declassified without compromising national security.”
Hypothetically, Medine said, the ability to turn voice into text would raise significant privacy concerns. And it would also raise questions about how the intelligence agencies “minimize” the retention and dissemination of material— particularly involving U.S. persons — that doesn’t include information they’re explicitly allowed to keep.
“Obviously it increases the ability of the government to process information from more calls,” Medine said. “It would also allow the government to listen in on more calls, which would raise more of the kind of privacy issues that the board has raised in the past.”
“I’m not saying the government does or doesn’t do it,” he said, “just that these would be the consequences.”

A New Learning Curve

Speech recognition expert Bhiksha Raj likens the current era to the early days of the Internet, when people didn’t fully realize how the things they typed would last forever.
“When I started using the Internet in the 90s, I was just posting stuff,” said Raj, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. “It never struck me that 20 years later I could go Google myself and pull all this up. Imagine if I posted something on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica or something like that, and now that post is going to embarrass me forever.”
The same is increasingly becoming the case with voice communication, he said. And the stakes are even higher, given that the majority of the world’s communication has historically been conducted by voice, and it has traditionally been considered a private mode of communication.
“People still aren’t realizing quite the magnitude that the problem could get to,” Raj said. “And it’s not just surveillance,” he said. “People are using voice services all the time. And where does the voice go? It’s sitting somewhere. It’s going somewhere. You’re living on trust.” He added: “Right now I don’t think you can trust anybody.”

The Need for New Rules

Kim Taipale, executive director of the Stilwell Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy, is one of several people who tried a decade ago to get policymakers to recognize that existing surveillance law doesn’t adequately deal with new global communication networks and advanced technologies including  speech recognition.
“Things aren’t ephemeral anymore,” Taipale told The Intercept. “We’re living in a world where many things that were fleeting in the analog world are now on the permanent record. The question then becomes: what are the consequences of that and what are the rules going to be to deal with those consequences?”
Realistically, Taipale said, “the ability of the government to search voice communication in bulk is one of the things we may have to live with under some circumstances going forward.” But there at least need to be “clear public rules and effective oversight to make sure that the information is only used for appropriate law-enforcement or national security purposes consistent with Constitutional principles.”
Ultimately, Taipale said, a system where computers flag suspicious voice communications could be less invasive than one where people do the listening, given the potential for human abuse and misuse to lead to privacy violations. “Automated analysis has different privacy implications,” he said.
But to Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, the distinction between a human listening and a computer listening is irrelevant in terms of privacy, possible consequences, and a chilling effect on speech.
“What people care about in the end, and what creates chilling effects in the end, are consequences,” he said. “I think that over time, people would learn to fear computerized eavesdropping just as much as they fear eavesdropping by humans, because of the consequences that it could bring.”
Indeed, computer listening could raise new concerns. One of the internal NSA memos from 2006 says an “important enhancement under development is the ability for this HLT capability to predict what intercepted data might be of interest to analysts based on the analysts’ past behavior.”
Citing Amazon’s ability to not just track but predict buyer preferences, the memo says that an NSA system designed to flag interesting intercepts “offers the promise of presenting analysts with highly enriched sorting of their traffic.”
To Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, keyword-search is probably the “least of our problems.” In an email to The Intercept, Rogaway warned that “When the NSA identifies someone as ‘interesting’ based on contemporary NLP [Natural Language Processing] methods, it might be that there is no human-understandable explanation as to why beyond: ‘his corpus of discourse resembles those of others whom we thought interesting'; or the conceptual opposite: ‘his discourse looks or sounds different from most people’s.'”
If the algorithms NSA computers use to identify threats are too complex for humans to understand, Rogaway wrote, “it will be impossible to understand the contours of the surveillance apparatus by which one is judged.  All that people will be able to do is to try your best to behave just like everyone else.”
Next: The NSA’s best kept open secret.
Readers with information or insight into these programs are encouraged to get in touch, either by email, or anonymously via SecureDrop.
Documents published with this article:

• RT10 Overview (June 2006)
• For Media Mining, the Future is Now! (August 1, 2006)
• For Media Mining, the Future is Now! (conclusion) (August 7, 2006)
• Dealing With a ‘Tsunami’ of Intercept (August 29, 2006)
• Coming Soon! A Tool that Enables Non-Linguists to Analyze Foreign-TV News Programs (October 23, 2008)
• SIRDCC Speech Technology WG assessment of current STT technology (December 7, 2009)
• Classification Guide for Human Language Technology (HLT) Models (May 18, 2011)
• Finding Nuggets – Quickly – in a Heap of Voice Collection, From Mexico to Afghanistan (May 25, 2011)
• How Is Human Language (HLT) Progressing?(September 26, 2011)
• “Black Budget” — FY 2013 Congressional Budget Justification/National Intelligence Program, p. 262 (February 2012)
• “Black Budget” — FY 2013 Congressional Budget Justification/National Intelligence Program, pp. 360-364 (February 2012)

Research on the Snowden archive was conducted by Intercept researcher Andrew Fishman.



https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text/

Extreme secrecy eroding support for Obama's trade pact Classified briefings and bill-readings in basement rooms are making members queasy.

Extreme secrecy eroding support for Obama's trade pact

Classified briefings and bill-readings in basement rooms are making members queasy.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

5/4/15 5:40 AM EDT

Updated 5/4/15 9:52 PM EDT

Getty

If you want to hear the details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal the Obama administration is hoping to pass, you’ve got to be a member of Congress, and you’ve got to go to classified briefings and leave your staff and cellphone at the door.

If you’re a member who wants to read the text, you’ve got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving.

Story Continued Below

And no matter what, you can’t discuss the details of what you’ve read.

“It’s like being in kindergarten,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who’s become the leader of the opposition to President Barack Obama’s trade agenda. “You give back the toys at the end.”

For those out to sink Obama’s free trade push, highlighting the lack of public information is becoming central to their opposition strategy: The White House isn’t even telling Congress what it’s asking for, they say, or what it’s already promised foreign governments.

The White House has been coordinating an administration-wide lobbying effort that’s included phone calls and briefings from Secretary of State John Kerry, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and others. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has been working members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro has been talking to members of his home state Texas delegation.

Officials from the White House and the United States trade representative’s office say they’ve gone farther than ever before to provide Congress the information it needs and that the transparency complaints are just the latest excuse for people who were never going to vote for a new trade deal anyway.

“We’ve worked closely with congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle to balance unprecedented access to classified documents with the appropriate level of discretion that’s needed to ensure Americans get the best deal possible in an ongoing, high-stakes international negotiation,” said USTR spokesman Matt McAlvanah.

Obama’s seeking a renewal of fast-track authority, which would empower him to negotiate trade deals that then go to Congress for up-or-down votes but not amendments. He says he needs that authority to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-country free trade agreement that he calls essential to stopping China from setting trade, labor and environmental standards in the Asia-Pacific region.

Administration aides say they can’t make the details public because the negotiations are still going on with multiple countries at once; if for example, Vietnam knew what the American bottom line was with Japan, that might drive them to change their own terms. Trade might not seem like a national security issue, they say, but it is (and foreign governments regularly try to hack their way in to American trade deliberations).

Moreover, many of the leaders of the opposition, administration aides argue, are people who aren’t used to dealing with classified information and don’t realize how standard this secrecy is. And by the way, they note, neither congressional conference committees nor labor contract talks allow even this level of access to negotiations while in process.

But those arguments aren’t making much headway among trade skeptics, who feel they are being treated with disrespect and condescension. And they increasingly are pinning the blame directly on United States Trade Representative Mike Froman, who’s been headlining the classified briefings, in addition to smaller meetings with members.

“The access to information is totally at the whim of Ambassador Froman,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who’s a hard no on fast track but says he’d like to see other ways of promoting international trade. “He likes to make available information that he thinks helps his case, and if it conflicts, then he doesn’t make the information available,” Doggett said.

Doggett, like other critics, pointed out that the cover sheets of the trade documents in that basement room are marked only “confidential document” and note they’re able to be transmitted over unsecured email and fax — but for some reason are still restricted to members of Congress.

“My chief of staff who has a top secret security clearance can learn more about ISIS or Yemen than about this trade agreement,” Doggett said.

“He’s incredibly condescending. It’s like, ‘You’d be all for this if only you hadn’t gotten an F in economics,’” said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who said he’s opposed to what he’s seen because it lacks labor standards and measures to address currency manipulation.

“We know when we’re being suckered,” said Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who said he believes that the USTR quotes percentages instead of absolute values on trade statistics that give an overly positive impression. “It’s not only condescending, it’s misleading.”

Asked about those criticisms, Froman responded by praising his adversaries.

“I have great respect for the critics, many of whom have shown great leadership on progressive causes, and I look forward to a continued dialogue with members of Congress based on facts and substance,” Froman told POLITICO.

Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), who supports giving Obama fast-track authority, says the division among Democrats is between members who are looking for a reason to say no and those that are actually trying to work on the deal.

“They’ve been very engaging with Congress and to members who want to be in the room and engaging them on the text … so we can ask questions but, more importantly, so we can provide input,” Kind said.

As for Froman, Kind said, “he’s very cordial, he’s very respectful and listening to other people’s opinion. … I don’t get a sense of condescension and arrogance.”

Kind says he expects several more Democrats to announce their support for the president’s efforts in the coming days, some of them because of what they’ve heard from Froman.

Doggett insisted that the outreach is costing the White House support.

“The more people hear Ambassador Froman but feel they get less than candid and accurate answers, I think it loses votes for them,” Doggett said.

Administration officials point to other members who’ve publicly praised Froman for his responsiveness and his accessibility. Those include House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who at a late April news conference called Froman a “remarkable, remarkable trade rep” who’s “just fabulous, and he’s been just boundless in his willingness to spend time with members to go through this.”

Pelosi herself remains undecided on the trade pact, though she says she’s trying to find a path to yes. She’s telling members what she’s told them from the start: They’re going to be able to influence the deal only if they actually engage with Froman and the White House.

In February, it was Pelosi who urged the administration to begin the briefings, warning that Democratic support was nowhere near what the White House would need for fast-track to pass the House.

Obama has started to get more personally engaged trying to shore up support for the deal. The president hosted a White House meeting Thursday with members of the New Democrat Coalition, who are generally inclined to support him on trade but still pressed him to make more information available.

“He emphasized that under the trade promotion bills, this is going to be the most transparent bill ever,” said Kind, who attended.

Two days earlier, speaking at the news conference he held in the Rose Garden with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Obama dismissed “this whole notion that it’s all secret.”

“They’re going to have 60 days before I even sign it to look at the text, and then a number of months after that before they have to take a final vote,” Obama said forcefully.

“He’s indignant when we say it’s secret,” said Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). “Maybe there’s some definition of secrecy he knows that I don’t know.”

LJ, this post is for you!

Are you a discruntled school teacher with an obsessive hatred for certain news sources? What gives? You are complaining in comments about spelling, accuracy, and news sources. Are you too stupid to realize most posts are copied from elsewhere? Are you too stupid to read the top header of this blog to understand this is an awareness blog? Not a fact blog? I have not seen one positive comment out of you. Just spewing garbage. My suggestion to you is get off the net, get off the prozac,  take a chill pill and do everyone else a favor and find something else to mock!

I will no longer approve any of your garbage comments.. also Popeye and Olive oil are to no longer approve any of your garbage.  ~Freewill