Officials who apparently thwarted an alleged terror plot against Europe used voiceprinting technology to catch several suspects.
By the time you are 18 you have a unique voice print:derlinguist.com
The British Government Communications Headquarters used voice identification technology to help uncover the plot according to a report in the Canadian Press. Several of the voices were recorded along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Police in southern France on Tuesday arrested 12 suspects in sweeps against suspected Islamic militant networks, including three men linked to a network recruiting fighters for Afghanistan.
In one of the cases, nine suspected Islamic militants were detained in southeastern Marseille and its suburbs, and authorities turned up at least one automatic rifle and a pump gun, the officials said.
In Tuesday’s other roundup, two men were arrested in Marseille and another in southwestern Bordeaux on suspected ties to a Frenchman arrested in Naples, Italy, last month accused of links to an Afghan recruiting ring.
Officials in Germany were tightlipped Tuesday on details of a U.S. missile strike in Pakistan’s rugged mountain border area where Pakistani officials said eight German militants were killed.
U.S. officials believe a cell of Germans and Britons was at the heart of the Europe terror plot. Germany’s ARD public television cited unidentified sources Tuesday as saying four of the Germans killed in the missile attack were of Turkish descent.
Developers of voice biometric technology say it can be more useful than traditional fingerprint analysis in fighting terror. The private sector has already embraced the technology, with U.S. probation officers using it to monitor offenders, and Canadian call centres using it to identify customers. Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi, says it has been using voice biometrics for the past decade to deter fraud and boost customer safety.
U.S. and British intelligence run an international eavesdropping program that gathers huge amounts of information. So big is the overload that the National Security Agency is building a massive storage centre in Utah to handle the mountains of data.
Almog Aley-Raz, whose Israel-based company PerSay Ltd. supplies governments and businesses around the world, said that using voice biometrics could allow officials to scan a large number of phone conversations for a several suspects’ voices, greatly streamlining intelligence work.
“An entry-level server enables you to run 100 streams of audio against maybe 100 voiceprints,” he said, noting that in some cases dozens or even hundreds of servers could be run back-to-back to comb through intercepted calls. Aley-Raz accepted that the technology had its flaws — it is vulnerable to background noise and poor audio quality, for example, and can become confused when people start talking over one another.
The k2p blog 