From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Jan 03 2004 - 20:13:50 EST
From: "Tom Emerson" <tree@basistech.com>
> FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, Immigration, LoC... they're all having problems
> with this. And the agencies rarely share information, and only now are
> they starting to define a common (though non-reversable)
> transliteration scheme: each agency has their own, and often different
> parts of the _same_ agency will have their own. And this is true for
> other languages (esp. Farsi and Pashto) as well.
Do you remember that the CIA, NSA and US Army were recruiting people in US
that had good linguistic skills in Pashto and Arabic in preparation for the
military intervention to Afghanistan, so that they would better understand
linguistic issues in official documents, tape records, and phone
interceptions? Were are those people now? May be these agencies still didn't
have enough trained people to work with these languages...
May be the track of Ben Laden has taken all resources for the Middle-East
area, and they are unable to work with travel agencies and airlines in
Europe that transport many European citizen with Arabic names...
If only the NSA could provide a tiny part of its collossal budget to
dedicate some people working in ISO and Unicode transliteration and
codification standards... then the international administrations, polices,
and airways companies would be able to work with common standards to
exchange usable information about people identities...
When I hear that commercial flights to US transporting innocent people are
now under the threat of being shot down by F16 warplanes, this is certainly
an underestimated danger for people security, if these agencies are able to
lie publicly, or send false information to military forces, or to force
civilian authorities to take decisions under false statements...
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