FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 22, 2002

SCHUMER: FUNDS FOR SYRACUSE UNIV. PROGRAM THAT COULD AID HOMELAND SECURITY CLEARS 1ST HURDLE

Senate subcommittee approves $1 million for Syracuse University website program aimed at making easier to translate Middle Eastern languages and dialects

Expanded system will assist homeland security and law enforcement agencies in searching and analyzing databases, including Al-Qaeda emails and web sites

US Senator Charles E. Schumer said a Senate subcommittee approved $1 million for Syracuse University to assist homeland security and law enforcement officials in searching and analyzing possible terrorist databases, documents, and web sites.

The funding, which Schumer personally requested, will help provide new technology that would enable detailed searches, analyses, and translation of web sites and databases written in Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and other Middle Eastern dialects.

"Syracuse University is playing a key role in making sure that our law enforcement agencies have the tools they need to fight the war on terrorism," Schumer said. "The school has pioneered a way to help homeland security agencies translate emails between terrorists, and search their computers for intelligence."

The funding for Syracuse University will expand the Center for Language Processing's "Cross-Language Information Retrieval" (CLIR) system to include crime identification technology programs. This program will expand the CLIR system to include Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and other Middle Eastern dialects and make it easier for agencies like the FBI, CIA, and Office of Homeland Security to access websites in those languages.

Currently, the CLIR system allows documents written in French, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese to be searched and retrieved through questions in English. The new technology will allow these agencies to process thousands of documents at the same time.

"If we can get some piece of intelligence or information, we need to be able to translate it," Schumer said. "This funding will go towards making sure that we can do that."

The funding still needs to get final approval from both the full Appropriations Committees and then the full Senate and House.

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