Canadian voice recognition article

[cmckie@ccs.carleton.ca (Craig McKie)]

Spy Agency works on eavesdropping device for phones, faxes
New snoop gadget would identify voices carried through air

The Canadian Press

Used on page 1, Ottawa Citizen, Monday January 31, 1994

   An elite wing of Canada's spy agency is secretly developing devices
that can monitor and identify voices carried through the air by phone,
fax and radio signals, according to a broadcast report citing
government documents.
   The Communications Security Establishment is a super-secret branch
of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that specializes in
gathering signals intelligence - SIGINT to insiders.
   Since 1989, the CSE has awarded three contracts worth $1.1 million
to a Montreal firm to make machines that can quickly isolate key words
and phrases from the millions of signals the CSE monitors each day,
CTV reported Sunday.
   In May 1983, the CSE awarded the Centre de Recherche Informatique
de Montreal a contract to develop a "speaker identification system,"
which can pick voices from the electronic haze and identify them.
   "Its frightening," says Bill Robinson, a researcher with the peace
group, Project Ploughshares. "It has Orwellian potential to sweep
through everybody's conversations. As computers get faster and faster,
theoretically, one would be able to keep records of all
conversations."
   The CSE is supposed to provide the federal government with foreign
intelligence, but parliamentarians have often voiced concerns about
the agency's potential to violate the privacy of Canadians.
   Liberal MP Derek Lee, the head of a Commons committee that oversees
Canada's spy agency, said the CSE is overstepping its mandate.
   "Have they been asked, or have they decided for themselves to take
on a new role that requires them to analyse the human voice? And if
they have, they've gone beyond what I think they've told us."
   The CSE is accountable to Parliament through the defence minister.
   But Defense Minister David Colonette told CTV her was unaware of
the CSE's latest electronic snooping projects.
   "This is the first I've heard of this," Collenette said. "It is
certainly something I'll discuss with my officials."
   While in Opposition, the Liberals pledged to make the CSE more
accountable.
   With a budget of about $250 milliojn and more than 800 employees
the CSE operates out of a building on Heron Road in Confederation
Heights surrounded by a barbed-wire fence.
   Its work is considered so sensitive that employees are told not to
take commercial flights, in case the plane is hijacked and they are
held hostage.