-Caveat Lector- Copyright 2001 The Washington Post: March 26, 2001 Making Sense of the Deluge of Data; CIA Technologies Refine Mass of Information Into Analysis by Vernon Loeb Every day, a digital monsoon engulfs the Central Intelligence Agency. Video and audio signals pour in from around the world as a million new pages pop up on the Internet. What's an intelligence agency to do about this "volume challenge of staggering proportion," as one CIA official called it? It is a question CIA scientists have spent millions of dollars addressing in recent years in a search for "data mining" technologies that produce knowledge from raw information. The answers can be found, not surprisingly, in CIA computers, programmed to automatically transcribe audio signals and translate Web pages in Chinese, Russian and numerous other languages. There's also software that can turn a bad guy's life story into a three-dimensional diagram of linked phone calls, bank deposits and plane trips. There's a system that alerts an analyst any time a new page goes up on a Web site of interest. And smart new search engines use "natural-language processing" instead of key words to answer complex queries. "The challenge we're trying to address here is how do we help individuals deal with the mass of information," said Larry Fairchild, head of the CIA's Office of Advanced Information Technology. "There is so much information coming in now in so many different formats -- audio, imagery, geospatial, text. If you add language to that, you see how complex the data field is." Imagine the challenge confronting an analyst assigned to understand China's emerging doctrine of computer warfare from hundreds of Chinese-language Web sites, many of which are linked to official Chinese military, academic and government organizations. Software called "Fluent" enables CIA personnel to perform "cross lingual" searches in English of Web sites in Chinese and 10 other languages, from Russian to Japanese. The software then translates the results almost instantaneously into English. Although "machine translation" technology has been around since the 1950s, CIA officials say it is becoming increasingly accurate and more powerful when combined with Web-based search capabilities. Another program, called "Oasis," uses "automated speech recognition" technology pioneered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to turn audio feeds into formatted, searchable text. The computer can distinguish one voice from another and duly differentiates "speaker 1" from "speaker 2" in transcripts. But alas, there are limits to even the most advanced of artificial brains: So far, the computer understands only "American" English, though it is learning various English "accents" -- and the CIA is busy, for obvious reasons, teaching it Chinese and Arabic. A half-hour broadcast, which used to take an analyst 90 minutes to listen to, assess and disseminate, now can be processed -- and stored in searchable format -- in 10 minutes, officials said. Other newly developed software, which the CIA calls its "surge tool kit," enables teams of analysts to quickly search, assess and reassemble large quantities of "open source" information when, during crises, they must produce in hours written analytic reports for the president and other policymakers. All of this "data mining" technology is designed to allow individual analysts to master gigabytes of digital information. But it is of critical institutional importance to the CIA, which must show that it can master the digital domain to survive in a world where it no longer controls most information. 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