Scotland Yard: Princess Diana's Phone Bugged By US "Secret Service"

Article: The American secret service was bugging Princess Diana's telephone conversations without the approval of the British security services on the night she died, according to the most comprehensive report on her death, to be published this week.

Among extraordinary details due to emerge in the report by former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Stevens is the revelation that the US security service was bugging her calls in the hours before she was killed in a car crash in Paris.

So...the British Royal family has concluded its investigation of its complete absence of any role in her death. (See the "Lord" in front of the report manager's last name? It's either a very ambitious first name, or a title granted by the Queen.) As is well and proper.

Only a couple of minor points remain unexplained: why Dodi Fayed's chauffeur was working for French intelligence, and why Diana's phone was bugged by an unspecified US intelligence agency. The writers don't care to speculate, and neither does Lord Stevens, having received assurances that nothing was awry. Gosh, I wonder why conspiracy theories linger over Diana's death?

Update: The National Security Agency is preparing a statement that it did not bug Diana's phone:

(CBS/AP) The National Security Agency is working on a statement that will deny eavesdropping on Princess Diana, a U.S. intelligence official tells CBS News national security correspondent David Martin.

Hogwash. The NSA has its largest world monitoring station in Northern England, and at the very least they would've monitored her cell phone conversations for gossip value alone.

One Day Hun, Blunder Serve Fails Lance

A speech recognition engine might transcribe the spoken phrase "One Nation, Under Surveillance" as "One Day Hun, Blunder Serve Fails Lance." Or to "Won Nary Tons Fundies Sir Salient." Or to "Dear aunt, let's so double the killer delete select all," as happens in this Microsoft Speech Recognition demo for their new Vista operating system. The poor product manager tries to dictate a "dear mom" letter in front of a bunch of reviewers, and hilarity ensues. Ah, yes. I know it well. This is my field, and I briefly had that guy's exact job several years back; they let me have it for awhile until they could find someone calmer, less prone to seizures, someone who wouldn't randomly scream out "Auaaaagggh!" in meetings, with no visible eye-twitch or physical abnormalities. And I was the lucky one. They found the new guy before I had to give one of these demos. Auaaaagggh!

Seriously, speech recognition has gotten pretty good. But it's also still sensitive, imperfect, and unpredictable, so it's not really ready for prime time in free-form applications like speaking English. It best performs repetitive tasks in narrow domains. Trying to understand people speaking full sentences is hard enough for a human, and some days I wonder if they do it very well at all. To be fair, the technology has come a very long way, and has gotten pretty good unless, say, you have a sinus infection or a fluorescent light happens to be on. Speaking of lights, it's very good at tasks like switching a light on and off. Almost always.

Our government, in its desire to be helpful, is applying speech recognition technology (not Microsoft's) to the problem of listening to phone conversations, you know, so we can tell who's running terrorist cells and where they're going to attack next. Last I checked I think the National Security Agency admitted to having about a $40 billion yearly budget, give or take a few score unreported black projects and a few hundred contractors. Making technology work for you. Feel better now?