Slashdot Mirror
How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text
Presto Vivace writes: Dan Froomkin reports at The Intercept: "Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community's 'holy grail,' the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and 'extract' the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest." I am torn between admiration of the technical brilliance of building software like this and horror as to how it is being used. It can't just be my brother and me who like to salt all phone conversations with interesting keywords.
Easy: Pipe it through Siri.
"I don't understand what you mean by, The bag of bees will be in the Reich locket at the county AirPlay."
I can't even get a device - of any power - to recognise my voice beyond the very slow, pronounced basics and I have to train myself to it (not the other way around).
Would love to know how the NSA have access to technology that the top voice-recognition specialists and software can't manage, let alone dealing with noisy backgrounds, masked keywords, variety of languages, etc.
"Acres of datacentres" don't help for the simplest of obscurations in the phone call and guess who has a reason to mask their intentions behind innocent words? Terrorists.
Yes but the spied on military and diplomatic communications, occasionally big industrial firms and very importantly foreign communications in most cases. The NSA is more or less spying on EVERY communication and domestic communications almost as frequently as foreign.
Its not the same.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
So they use speech to text software, and that's technical brilliance? There's half a dozen exceedingly good ones used in various fields of medicine that are able to handle many different languages and thickly accented English.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Were they spying in bulk on the whole population?
At the time of World War II, most people's electronic communications were limited to an occasional telelphone call, and perhaps the odd telegram. Now most people communicate electronically almost constantly with friends, colleagues, employers, health providers...you get the picture.
So, in case you hadn't noticed, the situation has changed just a little since WWII. Electronic surveillance of civilians is a bit more of an issue now.
Hail Hydra!!!!
"Hey mom, I just named my new dog. I call him President Obama's Secret Isis Terror Gun Bomb. Lets talk about him a lot over the phone using his full name."
The British, the Americans, and the other code-breaking entities were breaking the codes of foreign countries that were hostile toward them. We celebrate Turing and his team because of that.
We can still look negatively upon the postwar years though, when the broken Enigma cypher was still being advertised as secure so that corporations would keep using it.
We can also look negatively as spying on ourselves. Whether it be the FBI keeping files on contientous objectors and other protesters that are generally operating within their rights whose opinions or objectives are legal even while contrary to those in power, or at random Joe Q Public who talks on the phone, it's not right to spy on people that are not doing anything wrong and don't intend to do wrong. The reason we have a system that's supposed to require warrants is to protect people from the state unless the state in the form of the executive branch can convince the legislative branch that there's a real and legitimate need to investigate a crime.
And don't even get me started on parallel construction. If the law enforcement entity is violating the accused's rights, then even a case in-parallel should be in jeopardy of being discarded due to the use of the non-presented evidence to provide investigative leads that let the other evidence be found.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
All of the voice recognition algorithms I've ever tried are terrible at recognizing anything said with an accent other than the one it was programmed to recognize. I have a Brazilian accent AND a speech impediment. I have never been able to use any voice recognition system in any language.
The difference between WW2 codebreakers and today's NSA and what have you being, of course, that WW2 codebreakers were used against to crack the communications of a defined enemy. So yes, it's perfectly reasonable to object to a practice that considers literally everybody, civilian or not, foreigner or not, to be an enemy.
As for your claim about lives saved vs. deaths caused: Citation needed. The secret police forces of Nazi Germany, Stasi Germany, Soviet Russia, and countless other dictatorships were certainly not in the business of saving lives. The intelligence agencies of the US and her allied governments are certainly not in the business of saving lives either. They are in the business of target selection for the US drone wars.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
There was a period of a month or so that I answered the phone (when caller-ID showed that it was a friend who was in on the joke) with things like "Kill the president" or "The dirty bomb is ready". ;-) This was after the news about Total Information Awareness came out (really, anyone who was surprised by the Snowden leaks hadn't been paying attention for the past decade prior... it was obvious what sort of capabilities they were working toward. Heck even back in the 1990s with Carnivore the US government was already starting down this path).
A lot of commercial IVR systems are able to parse for keywords without altering your natural speech patterns. I called a my credit card company's customer service line yesterday, and it IVR prompt asked that I describe the reason for my call. I said, "I have a question about a charge on my bill," and it correctly connected me to the chargeback section. Speech recognition has progressed quite a bit in the last decade or so.
It affect ME therefore I am against it.
After seeing citizen 4, seems to me habeas corpus is worth jack squat, and NSA knows no bounds or limits or even have the faintest hint of of human decensy.
Just look at what they did to that lavabit guy. Install a backdoor, or give us your customers data or you will be tossed in some remote jail.
He chose to just go out of business. What a bunch of fucking assholes.
Other countries are spying on us too, including our allies.
Proper Intelligence can be used for peace too. If we don't know what the other people are up too, we can take public rhetoric out of context and consider it threatening.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Spying 70 years ago isn't the same thing as it is now. Also "spying" would convey some sort of secrecy. At the moment is more like here is what we are spending your tax money on and there isn't a thing you can do about it. The Gettysburg Address is the toilet paper for the people.
Even as far back as 2010, we have piloted speech anayltics that are amazing. Nice has an interesting approuch, which is pretty good if a bit slow. Nexedia has really really nice software, It's fast, and the processed data is dumped into mysql backend for reporting.
Nexedia was initially an isreali intelligence application.
You have made the most incredibly stupid statement on slashdot in the past decade. Oppressive regimes that *spy on their own citizens* have slaughtered millions. You are an ignorant moron of the highest caliber.
In WWI the amount of communications done by ordinary citizens was much smaller.
Now it's a completely indiscriminate thing which says "we're going to spy on everybody just in case".
This is outrageous, and essentially amounts to general warrants and saying "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide".
Sorry, but no, fascist assholes who want to right to spy on everybody without warrant, probable cause, or oversight ... these people should be hanged.
Fuck them all if that's what they want to do.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It helps the acceptance when you're not being spied on by "your own side".
And all the voice samples from "OK Google" and SIRI are theirs to sort through.
After turning on the personal voice sampling (to make OK google more accurate) the tablet never misses a beat, it knows exactly what I'm saying whether I just woke up, in the middle of eating, or with a cold.
I also left an older version of the Nexus 7 tablet (first gen) off for several months, upon turning it on I was surprised to see it was "ready to install" an system update, one that I never approved downloading in the first place, and of course IT HAD BEEN OFF.
Meh, is anything really "off" any more? And what else does it do?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
ME? Certainly not. It didn't happen until vista that speech recognition was brought to perfection
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
It's not like the NSA can actually DO/b anything with this shit.
We know the government would like some positive press about anticipating events, but a perfect opportunity arose recently when two men opened fire outside a contest for Prophet Mohammed cartoons in a Dallas suburb Sunday night.
Reminds me of Dionne Warwick who hawked Psychic Friends Network.She ran out of money. Why didn't her friends warn her?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Perhaps it's time to change our standard telephone salutations to include the keywords they are looking for. :P
You can be sure they're not flagging "hello" or "goodbye". I propose all phone calls now be answered by saying "Death to the president.... Yes, this is Steve. No, I am not interested in changing my long distance provider."
So they shouldn't conduct any spying trying to watch ISIS or Hamas or Al Queda or Boko Haram since none of those are countries? If you say yes they can, then how do you draw the line of where they can look to see the communications of individuals operating in the name of such terrorist organizations, since after all, those are the communications of individuals? I think they have gone too far, but please enlighten us with clear rules to say where the line is?
The difference is, when people used to spy during peace time, we didn't have the Internet. Now anybody who records router logs knows your web traffic history, basically we've all become spies. Except spies of the past were politically motivated, they were to be feared if you thought differently than whomever they worked for. Today, the IT guy fixing your computer remotely has the same technology a spy used, but he's just sipping coffee and running updates. The culture is what screwed it all up, people trusted their computer with their most intimate thoughts, love letters, hate letters, all of which are now being judged by a what could be best described as a vengeful-it-guy. That does two things, either chills the person away from the Internet and recording, or forces them to put on a happy smile and agree with whatever these new spies are hunting. And now we learn, indeed just not using a computer doesn't exclude you from the wide net of hateful strangers with opinions that could change your life. So yes indeed it's concerning, perhaps we should all watch each other watching each other at the end, or maybe ... a good idea could be, bring Snowden home, hang a few evildoers, and don't make this whole ISIS thing so ... commercialized. We used to get into wars for moral reasons, now it's just like rooting for a football team. Or we can always take the path of least resistance and just continue to assume the public is a bunch of duck dynasty idiots who'll believe whatever they see on T.V., where's Ron Burgundy?
Please mod this up.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If you want to search an audio or video recording, even a fairly poor speech to text can be very useful. A 90% success rate (1 word in 10 being incorrect) would provide a very frustrating transcript if you wanted to read it. However, if you are looking for a certain set of keywords or phrases, then 90% is likely to be perfectly adequate - after all, the point is to select "conversations of interest" that can then be listened to more intently.
Anslatetrey isthey, igpey uckersfey!!
** absgrey otchcrey **
The intelligence agencies of the US and her allied governments are certainly not in the business of saving lives either. They are in the business of target selection for the US drone wars.
1. Drone strikes are an incredibly small part of what comes out of the actions of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
2. Their mission is to collect intelligence to protect the U.S., where saving lives is a natural consequence of that, but for the most part they are not the DIRECT actors doing the saving, so perhaps that is what your statement was saying, though in a very slanted and misleading way.
Human listening was clearly not going to be the solution. âoeThere werenâ(TM)t enough ears,â he said.
That's kind of what made the average Joe feel safe. He thought, they can't possibly listen to everyone, and there's nothing interesting about me.
This technology is the bomb! But, I will provide a colloquialism, ala Admiral Ackbar: "Take evasive action!" Incinerate any predisposition you may have to using keywords, like: bomb, infidel, jihad, Great Satan, etc. Instead, peace be upon you, and all your phone conversations.
sig: sauer
please enlighten us with clear rules to say where the line is?
Official borders of the USA. That's not my opinion; it's the law.
I second the motion.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Irrelevant really.
The people who run these spies made a promise, that promise is known as the constitution and it places limits on their powers. They have every right to change that promise, but no right whatsoever to break it without changing it first.
It seems clear to me that all of this mass survillance is a massive violation of our right to be secure in our persons and effects. They have no right to implement ANYTHING which violates that promise without first changing the promise. Not even a little bit, not even for good reasons or to save lives.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It's more like the FBI's investigations into various criminal and subversive groups.
IS is a country. Not a recognized one by the USA... yet.
As for Boko haram; They are just a bunch of retarded thugs. But these aligned themselves with IS months ago. So for all intensive purpose, Boko haram is IS.
Over most of history spying has saved lives more than taken them.
*Citation needed*
I'm fairly certain that while spying by "our" side has probably saved many of "our" lives, it has also probably been used to take many of "their" lives. As well as spying by "their" side being a root cause of them taking many of "our" lives.
Fit any of your own designations of who "our" and "their" are into that sentence, and I'd bet it holds true.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Jesus fucking Christ. Have you looked at a map? There's fucking lines drawn EVERYWHERE on the damn thing. What the FUCK could they possibly MEAN?
Here's an idea for you: some of those lines represent the border of our country. Spying on one side of that line is what spies do. It's generally regarded as an act of war against those countries when you get caught, but that's what spies do. Spying on the other side of that line is committing an act of war against the states, which is the Constitutional definition of treason. That's why we let the Britons spy on us and get our information from them, which is aiding a foreign country in committing an act of war against the states, which is the other definition of treason, but we've been ignoring that one for years now.
You are looking at it wrong. The only limit of government's codebreakers — including the venerable Alan Turing — was the available hardware. They too listened for all communications — there just weren't as many at the time, and they could not process as much as their "descendents" can now.
They were limited neither by laws nor by ethics — merely by the tech. Being forced to prioritize, they concentrated on the entities you've enumerated, but NSA — thanks to Moore's law — does not... Whether we ought to clip NSA's powers or not, there really is no difference between them and Bletchley Park — both did/do everything possible.
And, BTW, ethics-wise, why is spying on an industrial firm any more acceptable than on you? Sauce for the goose, sauce for the quail...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
please enlighten us with clear rules to say where the line is?
Official borders of the USA. That's not my opinion; it's the law.
So any communication between an ISIS fighter who got into the US illegally and their control structure back in Syria cannot legally be intercepted? The law doesn't draw the line at the border, it draws it at the nationality of the person. That isn't my opinion, it is the National Security Act of 1947.
A keyword alone is meaningless. "They" has had this sort of search in mind for a very long time.
They inverse model the vocal aparatus as a finger-print. They know who is talking on either side of the line, by name. Yes, even if it is grandma.
They use signal analytics to determine where the signal comes from. They know where the speakers are located.
Many conspiracy theorists have been salting the conversation for a long time. This is a known and likely long-solved problem.
There are many folks who are not allowed to have their voice recorded, or to speak on a non-classified line. This means multiple nations have this technology.
Interesting problems would include 1) being able to falsify the vocal aparatus in such a way that the voice-print recognition doesn't work, AND doesn't flag as not working and 2) creation and use of non-libraried phoneme/phonology/grammar sets so that recognition is not available by lookup.
In all likelihood, the false positives suggested by the OP and others in this discussion are unlikely to trigger any such NSA attention.
Coming from a data science background, I suspect they are transcribing and indexing all conversations as best as is possible with their elite voice recognition technology. Once it's in ASCII stored in a database, they can datamine the conversations of known radicals and jihadists. The algorithms that are generated don't so much emphasize specific keywords, but they generate a scoring system across a bunch of conversations by known haters-of-American-Freedom.
With filters in hand, they can look at who talked to the known villains and score them and run down the trails of phone calls, emails, text messages, and internet chats to see who else might be a solid villain candidate. Even just monitoring internet traffic to known jihadist websites can likely get the filters applied to a person's communications to see if they might be a person-of-interest.
Keywords will come into play AFTER an attack like the Garland Draw Mohammed contest. The NSA is right now filtering recent past conversations among suspected jihadists looking for relevant keywords such as 'Garland', 'American Freedom Defense Institute', 'Pamela Geller', and 'Elton Simpson'. Any conversation leading up to the attack including those keywords would absolutely put someone on a watchlist. And everyone who that person is talking to would be suspect as well.
Bottom line is, these tools are being used retroactively to bolster detective work. Talking about bombs and the President's name doesn't do anything because there are a thousand-million conversations using those words everyday.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'VE BEEN WAITING YEARS FOR THIS TO LEAK OUT!
I hoped that metadata would purposely be picked as the 1st phase so people realize how bad that is. But I knew they were listening to all our calls for a really long time now. They have special DSPs that handle many phone conversations at a time and transcribe it into text; the hardware and tech was declassified almost a decade ago and it may not have been Siri grade it never needed to be (plus they don't declassify until they have something much better to replace it.)
They don't need super massive data centers to store metadata, but to store the text transcriptions of everything said; that is another situation. They wouldn't even need to trash messages classified as worthless.
As far as you being interesting; you getting flagged for some reason; just a transcription error can cause you to be flagged for more attention. Still that might turn out harmless or you might be molested at the airport for years until finally removed from that list (but likely HMS screws up and you never get off that list even if you were only flagged for a few days.)
Later on when times get bad; all that data could provide useful information to use against you-- right now you are a nobody but later on you might have somebody who doesn't like you in power. It doesn't have to be overt either... you could find yourself unable to get loans, jobs, etc with no clue as to why. (as long as they don't ban you from McDonalds, you'll never know and be too busy as you flip burgers at min wage jobs.)
Citation?
Cuban Missile Crisis
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Countries that spy on their own civilians have a less than stellar track record. Nobody even remotely sane would think Martin Luther King, and John Lennon would need to be spied on... but guess what, they were!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not only that, but countries worked with each other's spy agencies to circumvent constitutional protections. Britain spies on US citizens (because Britain doesn't protect foreigners), and US spies on British citizens (because the USA doesn't protect foreigners).
And yet all of this spying and technology, they can't stop two gunmen attacking a Texas art show mocking Mohammad. No, a couple of bullets were more powerful and accurate than a multi-billion dollar farce of a program encompassing multiple 1st-world nations and the civil liberties of hundreds millions of people.
Over most of history spying has saved lives more than taken them.
I find it so odd that people on Slashdot sing the praises of the "Codebreakers" of WWII but are shocked and freaked out that they are still around today. BTW the US and Britian both spied and used code breaking before the war started so... Yes they were spying in peacetime!!!!! Shocking.
No, spying has not saved more lives than it's cost. Spying is what caused countless Russians to be sent to Gulags, countless Jews to be sent to concentration camps, countless people from the DPRK to be killed because they disagreed with the "dear leader". In fact go back further in history and see how many lives spying cost throughout history.
The first problem is that you are attempting to claim foreign and domestic spying are the same. They are not the same, have never been the same. Domestic spying _always_ has nefarious purposes. We could argue similarly with foreign spying as well. How many people in DPRK has China spying caught? How many people in East Germany were caught by Russians?
JFK's famous line "the very word secrecy in a free and open society is repugnant" is spot on. It's not really hard to understand "why" if you look at the big picture.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Not only is it outrageous and unconstitutional, it's totally valueless. The Feds can't even stand in the way of people for whom they have good information that they might be interested in doing harm, let alone find anything new. The real purpose of a program that is so ineffective, can only be to retroactively find dirt on political outcasts and then put them in prison.
Citations:
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/rs...
http://articles.chicagotribune...
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
If IS is not recognized by the US, then by the previous poster's argument their people cannot be spied on.
Regarding the rest of your post, almost all such groups are aligned with a country in some way, so by your definition, spying on almost all groups is therefore legal?
And watch the aligned with someone transference argument. If I align with the Red Cross by giving them money, and the Red Cross aligns with Syria to provide aid to victims of ISIS, them by your transference argument I am aligned with and supporting Syria?
occasionally big industrial firms
mostly spied on big industrial firms for other big industrial firms who where paying moonlighting employees.
Phrases are transcribed from things like:
"Government agencies like the NSA have illegally spied on countless americans without a warrant and continue to violate our constitutional right to free speech as well as privacy"
to:
"Isis anchor baby bombs are protected from harming american patrio-tastic freedom time parades using secret 007 spy gear to thwart kenyan muslim abortion terrorists who hate our freedom"
Good people go to bed earlier.
I thought they only recorded phone call metadata. Since when are they recording the content of phone calls? Do they record the content of all phone calls or just their targets?
Srsly, someone needs to write a long-format magazine article summarizing the current state of knowledge regarding the Snowden revelations. It's hard to keep up.
So absolutely no monitoring of foreigners, like the Russian Ambassador, when they are inside the US borders?
"The difference between WW2 codebreakers and today's NSA and what have you being, of course, that WW2 codebreakers were used against to crack the communications of a defined enemy. So yes, it's perfectly reasonable to object to a practice that considers literally everybody, civilian or not, foreigner or not, to be an enemy."
Actually the spying was on all nations. It was only after the US started Lend-Lease that the spying was restricted by the US. The USSR spied on the US all through the war even when they where our "friend". Frankly that action is why the spying on "friendly" countries became common. For example during the Yom Kippur war the US spied on Israel to and made them live up the the cease fire.
The US was spying on Germany and German companies long before 12/7/41. They spying on Japan also predates the war.
Sure work to put laws into place and make them good ones to protect US citizens but also understand that every nation will spy to the best of it's abilities. If you thin Nations in Asia, the EU, South America, or Africa are any different than you are simply fooling yourself.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The problem with gadget security is it will always let you down and is why mass surveillance is counter productive. The larger the dataset, the harder it is to extract any useful information. When you're trying to process billions and billions of records, gadget security is your only option. It's a huge waste of effort and, as the Boston Marathon Bombers and those dead idiots in Texas proved, it's still relatively easy to slip through.
Terrorists are smart enough not to speak in plain language, so I don't get the NSA's addiction to mass surveillance. The tactics that work aren't sexy or easy.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
You voted for CHANGE, what you got was a change for the worse.
It's more like the FBI's investigations into various criminal and subversive groups.
All the arm chair investigators/intelligence officers need at this point is delivery of doughnuts, but they'll have that covered with the drones in no time. I predict a surge in treadmill sales and potentially a government contract to provide and service them.
I call BS. I can't even get a device - of any power - to recognise my voice beyond the very slow, pronounced basics and I have to train myself to it (not the other way around).
Sorry to break it to you, but you're wrong.
For one, want you can't do, and what today computers and networks certainly can - after being configured and programmed accordingly - is sample bazillions of phonecalls from millions and millions of people at insane speeds and aggregate speech patterns and their written equivalent by searching for the fitting existing transscripts and do a weighted correlation of those. All with the support of speech and language optimized signal processing, sampling of regional habits and the target groups favorite set of vocabulary.
Guess why Apples Siri and Google Now / Voice Search need an uplink to work ... exactly, that's why. ... And those devices pre-process the signals on a freaking cheapo smartphone before sending them in for analytics to get the results back.
Turning speech into easyly searchable transscripts probably is a piece of cake by now for those who have the storage, processing power, access to unlimited phone-taps and north of 20 000 Mathematicians to programm it all.
Like a certain U.S. three letter agency that has been getting so much unwanted attention lately.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
if he's inside the embassy, it's not U.S. territory....
besides, that's the point of something like an ambassador - not getting spied on and enjoy diplomatic immunity (although the reality sure looks different)
The mobile prepaid contract of my mother apparently locks down when the phone is unused for a month or so and she hates calling anybody with the mobile but still needs it occasionally when travelling. So she calls herself from mobile to landline every few weeks and tells herself hello and a few niceties.
Both metadata and content look quite weird for someone purportedly living alone.
It's more like the FBI's investigations into various criminal and subversive groups.
The FBi is a law enforcement organization. It's their job to investigate US citizens when there is reason to believe they are involved in breaking US law.
The NSA is a military organization. Their charter (and the constitution) explicitly precludes them from targeting US citizens, yet they do it anyway. What does it mean when a country's military deems every citizen such a threat to national security that they are considered valid intelligence targets? It says to me we are considered the enemy - each and every one of us. This cannot possibly end well.
Can you cite your sources for when the britons have spied on U.S. citizens and then gave the information back to the U.S. Government?
There is a story (I've heard it from several sources over the years but I won't vouch for its veracity) about an early translation program that the US military commissioned, sometime in the sixties I think, that illustrates some of the problems. This program was meant to translate English to Russian and vice versa. At the demo all the higher-ups were there, typically not having a clue about the complexity or pitfalls of the task. One of them suggested that the phrase "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" be entered, translated into Russian, and the resulting phrase translated back to English. The technician did what he was told and I have visions of cabinet-sized tape drives spinning furiously for awhile until the processing was complete. Finally, the printer spat out the result. I hear the technician dropped the paper and ran away. When someone picked up the printout it said "The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten!"
The British, the Americans, and the other code-breaking entities were breaking the codes of foreign countries that were hostile toward them. We celebrate Turing and his team because of that.
We can still look negatively upon the postwar years though, when the broken Enigma cypher was still being advertised as secure so that corporations would keep using it.
We can also look negatively as spying on ourselves. Whether it be the FBI keeping files on contientous objectors and other protesters that are generally operating within their rights whose opinions or objectives are legal even while contrary to those in power, or at random Joe Q Public who talks on the phone, it's not right to spy on people that are not doing anything wrong and don't intend to do wrong. The reason we have a system that's supposed to require warrants is to protect people from the state unless the state in the form of the executive branch can convince the legislative branch that there's a real and legitimate need to investigate a crime.
And don't even get me started on parallel construction. If the law enforcement entity is violating the accused's rights, then even a case in-parallel should be in jeopardy of being discarded due to the use of the non-presented evidence to provide investigative leads that let the other evidence be found.
There are some really important differences between intelligence, and evidence. You shouldn't lump them in the same boat and expect the same standards for both, "because government". If parallel construction nets lawfully collected evidence and doesn't break any evidence rules, that's good evidence.
Nobody wants the government in their lives, but if they're doing something only the idea of which offends you, that's not what our legal system was for. Write your politician. Also, intelligence is not something you gather while investigating a crime...
Don't they keep insisting that they only collect metadata and not actual conversations? If they collect specific conversations with specific targeted people involved in actual crime, couldn't they just deal with those manually?
Because they spied on the enemy, the foreign entities that were trying to harm them.
The problem today is, this tech is being aimed domestically as well as on foreign enemies....without due process or proper warrants showing probably cause.
The objection is the broad dragnet of information being captured and analyzed, of presumable innocent citizens.
If this were ONLY being aimed at the enemy, not only would most folks here not have a problem with it, they'd whole heartedly support it!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Anyone with a minimal level of training knows this, and uses methods that our intercepts won't catch.
We only catch the n00bZ.
And, in point of fact, the times we get people to give away things, they're not in the US, but in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan mostly).
Intercepts in the US rarely catch anything useful, and have such a high level of red herrings we waste a lot of resources that would be otherwise used profitably overseas, not in the US itself.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Spying on the general public rarely works. Spying in foreign countries and main jump points does, but we spend way too much spying on Americans in America, which creates more misleading data and obscures the real data from overseas.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The difference between WW2 codebreakers and today's NSA and what have you being, of course, that WW2 codebreakers were used against to crack the communications of a defined enemy. So yes, it's perfectly reasonable to object to a practice that considers literally everybody, civilian or not, foreigner or not, to be an enemy.
As for your claim about lives saved vs. deaths caused: Citation needed. The secret police forces of Nazi Germany, Stasi Germany, Soviet Russia, and countless other dictatorships were certainly not in the business of saving lives. The intelligence agencies of the US and her allied governments are certainly not in the business of saving lives either. They are in the business of target selection for the US drone wars.
I'm baffled that anyone could think spying is just some wartime activity...
Intelligence is not something you collect on ENEMIES, it is any information that is collected, analyzed, and digested into something you can base decisions on.
Secret police with even ZERO centralized intelligence are a totally separate problem in-themselves.
I think there should be a better firewall between the justice department agencies and intelligence agencies outside of it, but not understanding what intelligence is for or why we need it is just ignorant.
Think about this for a second. Why is this surprising?
I don't know about other people here, but I don't even check my voicemail anymore. Google handles that, and has for years. The voicemail transcription I get through Google Voice is almost always good enough that I can determine who called, what they want, and where to call them back to talk further.
Keep in mind, this is a 'free' service to me, I don't pay anything. Due to the volume of people they do it for, I'm certain they they're trying to meet economies of scale and reducing the overhead. Who do you think funds the storage, equipment, etc. for all of this? Adsense?
And it's no secret that the NSA had early involvement with Google.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If I told you, I would have to kill you.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Like esperanto :-) or even better some obscure language like the Navaho Code,
The Russians call it "Kompromat". NSA automated the collection of "kompromat".
Most people quickly fall back in line if they hear one of their phone conversations repeated from a guy sitting behind them in the train.
It's a method of Ruling By Intimidation. Welcome to the Land Of the Jails !
... for starters.
Yes, it's not a solution to the problem but it's a start.
There is ZERO need to record ALL phone conversations, instead there must be a small list of persons which have their communications tapped, because of their political, criminal or terrorist affiliations.
But that is not what NSA wants. They want TOTAL COLLECTION, even against Americans and Germans. The computer and automatic transcription make it possible. And the tame public, who allow this Tshekist Shite to go on because of some Flimsy Excuses.
Have the people learned anything since Rome ? No, all they need is bread and the naked flesh of the Kardashians. Damn freedom.
Can you cite your sources for when the britons have spied on U.S. citizens and then gave the information back to the U.S. Government?
He heard it from a friend, who heard it from a friend, who heard it from his barber. You know, the standard way these things are leaked.
Actually the NSA's charter is secret, so you have no idea what it precludes them from doing.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Your wall of text does not make the lies of General Hayden, General Alexander and many others go away. They are habitual liars who have developed an art of twisting words and facts until they can declare to be benign.
For example, they collect ALL PHONE METADATA in the US, but at the same time claim they do not collect against ordinary Americans. They clain "we have no dossier on ordinary Americans", because a dossier is probably a paper file according to their twisted "logic".
In fact NSA has a dossier on every American, it is The Total Telefone Call History Since 1990. But hey, it is electronic, so it is not a file. See the logic ?
We must assume "they do not listen to your phone calls". Instead, a computer does it and performs transcription. Until they do not print out the transcriptions and put it in a paper file, they have no dossier on you, correct ? Welcome to General Officer's Truthies.
Interesting problems would include 1) being able to falsify the vocal aparatus in such a way that the voice-print recognition doesn't work, AND doesn't flag as not working and 2) creation and use of non-libraried phoneme/phonology/grammar sets so that recognition is not available by lookup.
Or use plain simple end-to-end encryption. (Constant encryption all they way between the two correspondents)
instead of using Skype (bascially a black box, and back befor microsoft them, their EULA mentionned that they'll collaborate with any local law enforcement agency) or analog POTS, try instead using standards like SIP or XMPP/Jabber/Jingle with proper encryption (e.g.: Jitzi is a software that implements SRTP/ZRTP encryption)
Then anyone trying to tap into that communication will only get noise.
Not that it's impossible for the NSA to do anything against this (they'll happily try to abuse any backdoor that they know of at each end-point).
At at least it will make it a bit less trivial for them to plain scan anything.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Right ON !
The record all calls, all e-mails, and all text messages.
That's why they need the massive data center in Bluffdale UT !
Blatant violation of the 4th amendment.
Freedom is toast in the USA.
There are some really important differences between intelligence, and evidence. You shouldn't lump them in the same boat and expect the same standards for both, "because government".
AFAIK I should in fact lump them together because they are both legally considered "evidence", and this is why parallel construction is used to create a legally valid cover story or substitute for illegally obtained evidence, am I wrong?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Turing was not breaking codes and reading messages of British citizens !
YES.
The record everything.
Dumb question: How do you determine which "contentious objectors" "don't intend to do wrong"? I'd argue that the what we've learned about the gunman in Texas shows that the FBI is operating within the constitution. They identified the guy as a potential threat, had no legal justification to do anything about it, and didn't. That's evidence of the system working. Sure, the tinfoil hats will claim it's a false flag or that it was a conspiracy to get the FBI more power, but the simplest explanation is that the FBI is doing a reasonable job, but staying within the bounds of the law.
You've fallen for a deliberate deception. Products of the military intelligence agencies are legally gotten, but are not legally admissible as evidence. This deception is part of the campaign to prevent the CIA from being able to engage hostile entities outside the US.
But, to play devil's advocate, how are people directly harmed by surveillance when they are protected from punishment by due process? People might not like being watched, but that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to society. We do a lot of things that we don't like as individuals because they help to sustain the lifestyles we enjoy. Paying taxes springs immediately to mind. I mean, it would be great if everyone just behaved nicely, and there were no threats to our security, but that's not the world we live in. So if surveillance can help to thwart attacks with no actual harm to innocent bystanders, then what's the problem? And if information wants to be free, then what's the point in even trying to shield it from the government's eyes?
(Also, you have your branches mixed up. The judicial branch issues warrants, not the legislature.)
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Did you get this press release from NSA.gov?
The intelligence community has a fairly well-defined enemy. It might not be as binary as Axis/Allies, but the enemies still want to self-identify under some collective banner, be it ISIS or Al Queda or Boko Haram. If they didn't, they wouldn't really be able to accomplish anything. Anonymous acts of violence are just anarchy, and none of those groups are anarchists. Far from it.
The difference is that we all use the same encryption these days. The is no "Al Queda Enigma Machine," or "ISIS Fialka." It's pretty much all RSA or AES. So finding and exploiting a weakness in one of those necessarily means finding and exploiting a weakness in everyone's communications, not just the targets. And, from an intelligence perspective, the only reason to limit your focus is to avoid being overwhelmed with too much information. If a similar level of scrutiny can be applied to a broader range of communications, then there's no compelling reason not to.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
They are not protected from punishment by due process.
All I want is for the system that permits wiretapping and other monitoring of those on all domestic soil to use the already extant system of going to the courts to get warrants. I'm okay with the warrant process being able to approve collection against the device, against the specific network access interface, or against the individual. This means that the warrant allows for collection against a specific device known to be used by the party that the government seeks to build a case against even of other individuals use that device, against a specific access interface (like their ISP connection) that the individual in question uses even if other individuals use that connection, or against other devices or connections that the individual starts to use.
What I'm not okay with is then monitoring the other individuals that use these devices or connections when those individuals use other devices or connections, without first obtaining warrants against those individuals as well. If the suspect under warranted surveillance uses a public coffee shop wireless connection then monitoring the connectivity from the coffee shop to the ISP is acceptable, and possibly incidentally catching traffic from other patrons of the establishment within the context of the original investigation only is possibly acceptable, but then going and monitoring the other patrons when they are on other connections, like their phones, their home ISP connections, etc, is not. If another patron is suspected of being involved, then a new warrant needs to be drafted for that individual.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You just said they're not legally admissible as evidence, the fact that the illegally gotten evidence could be legally gotten military intelligence is entirely irrelevant - the evidence is still just as illegal as if a cop had broken into a house and stolen it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Thoughtcrime is generally not a crime, and conspiracy is very difficult to prove without the crime that the conspiracy planned actually being carried out, especially when it's possible for the end actor to decide at the last moment to not do anything. It is absolutely impossible to stop every crime.
I have not read on the particulars of the Texas shooting, but if the gentlemen were not US citizens and had previous run-ins with the law with convictions that should have prevented them from owning firearms, then it sounds like their being able to get firearms to carry out their attack is part of the problem. If they obtained them from otherwise legal sources then the system that should prevent the purchase failed. If they obtained them through black market means, then obviously the nature of firearms law allows for those that aren't supposed to have guns to have them.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If the various government entities kept their warrantless monitoring exclusively to foreign places then perhaps that would work. Unfortunately there appears to be domestic warrantless monitoring too.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I'm certain for Stalinist Russia, there was some good that objectively came out of mass surveillance as well. It was however relative to which side of the surveillance you were on. True liberty comes with risks. Security is a lie surveillance tells those who are being watched.
The sad part here, is that you aren't being given the choice to opt out, and keep the liberties that were granted to the citizens in America.
This was meant to be a response to LWATCDR. Sorry for the mix up.
Because a terrorist might have gotten into American borders, the entire world needs to be watched? There can be no liberties in such a world. I'd rather die in a terrorist attack. There will always be a threat somewhere. One day you might realize that governments are more dangerous than nameless, faceless, borderless terrorists ever were.
I am torn between admiration of the technical brilliance of building software like this and horror as to how it is being used.
The technical brilliance of voice recognition combined with data mining need not be met with horror... All the horror can be reserved for the separate issue of mass surveillance.
You sort of glossed over the thrust of my argument in one sentence. We don't just throw people in jail (mostly). They have to be charged, and go to court, and be convicted by a jury, etc. Due process. It's not like we systematically disappear people because they were overheard saying something about the President. Stating that they do not enjoy such protections does not make it so.
They *do* have to get a warrant for targeted surveillance. They get it from FISA.
What I'm not okay with is then monitoring the other individuals that use these devices or connections when those individuals use other devices or connections, without first obtaining warrants against those individuals as well.
That's never going to happen. Even if the scope of the warrant was limited to, say, the owner of the line, courts have repeatedly and consistently permitted information acquired incidental to the execution of the warrant. That is to say, if there's a warrant to search your house for documents, and they find your husband's drug stash while executing the warrant, they can still bring charges against your husband. So the scope of the warrant might be limited to the owner of the phone line, but in reality, they would have to listen to the conversation to know who is speaking, and in so doing they may make additional, admissible, discoveries.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Except almost all of that was other organizations of just complete fabrications.
Dialling random numbers from a public phone and saying "Is it done?", or "Man, you gotta help me, I did it but there's blood and brains everywhere!"
For the win.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
hm, wonder if AC's on about the leaked memos between the NSA and GCHQ detailing how GCHQ would do the eavesdropping to get around the wiretapping laws and feed the data back to Homeland?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You think there are "no liberties" now in the US, try living in a country that does no spying on any other country and see how long you last. (Spoiler alert - a very short time)
They made sure they got in. Border patrol ordered to stand down. Huge numbers sent on paid vacation to ensure a porous border. Give it... maybe a month or two. They'll have the martial law excuse Jade Helm is training them for. Everyone seems to miss that their 'excuse' of training is just as threatening as what we fear they're doing. Why does the US military need to train to infiltrate the US citizenry?
"How deep is the river, if you cannot see the bottom."
That is why we need to research and implement pre-crime enforcement.
Take him to the gulag!
Before Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, humanity didn't have a concise description for the notion of inalienable rights. Nothing Thomas Jefferson wrote was novel. He drew heavily upon contemporary French and Scottish political philosophy. But it was his formulation that set the world on fire.
The notion of privacy rights is in its infancy. Most people have a sense that their privacy is valuable and meaningful, but there's no simple, shared concept that encompasses that feeling.
Exercise: try to describe inalienable rights or natural rights from first principles! The same objections that can applied to privacy rights are equally applicable to all the other so-called natural rights we believe in these days.
The best theory for privacy rights I've read originated from a tome analyzing privacy in the age of electronic surveillance, and it was written in the early 1960s! It goes something like this: why do you value the privacy of your inner thoughts? Because they allow you to analyze and play with ideas and feelings without the fear of other people judging you. Now, you might think there's a black & white dichotomy between the thoughts in your head and some kind of manifestation of that thought in the physical world, and that anything you do in the physical world is fair game in terms of surveillance. But the physical world is equally necessary and valuable in terms of allowing people to analyze and play with ideas, including how they think about their own identity. There's no neat dividing line between the thoughts in your head and the expression of those thoughts. Obviously some expressions (conspiring to blow up a building) are more consequential than others (writing in your journal). Therefore, there's a shared interest in protecting some kind of privacy in order to promote people's personal development.
Secondly, it's about self-determination, identity, and what is the "self". We all try to control how other people think of us by selectively hiding or exposing various aspects of ourselves. There's no neat dividing line there, either. But certainly we can all understand that people should retain some degree of control over the things that people can know about you. Nobody wants to live in a glass house. Plus, surveillance and data archiving mean our mistakes can stay with us forever. How you can grow personally if you can't get away from your former self? How to handle that is problematic--do we only give people tools to prevent information leakage in the first instance, or do we also give them tools to redact information that has already leaked to the public (a la the European Court of Justice's "right to be forgotten"). Either way, there's something obviously important we're trying to protect there. The only question is at what cost.
People try to capture these concepts with the retort, "well, why don't you leave your curtains open", except many people don't really think about what that really means, fundamentally. And without a strongly shared normative abstraction that we all accept, it's something we must constantly justify. Unlike, for example, something like procedural due process--that even though the sovereign can do whatever he likes, he must still regularize the process of executing his will, and provide a forum for justification, even if it's just a rubber stamp forum. Even that concept is completely foreign to most of the world.
I was given a demo of a commercial archival/search product that searches audio files (standalone and also as email attachments) for words. It was surprisingly accurate.
Nope, wrote it myself, asshole. But thanks!
Yes.
Turing was not breaking codes and reading messages of British citizens !
How can you possibly know that?
I imagine that if the Military found an encrypted message from a possible spy they wouldn't have said "we can't touch this, he's a British citizen".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I find people so amusing.
Why would anyone have any doubt that the NSA is using the best tech available? The majority of people seem to be happy with what is going on. Frankly if you voted for President Obama you voted for mass surveillance. He knows all about, he authorises it, and he supports it.
Frankly I am all for people pushing for better laws and regulations but the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over it when they voted for it is just over the top.
Grow up people. Every nation will spy on every other nation to the best of it's ability. Only laws can restrict them from local surveillance and only your spies can protect you from the other nations spies.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There was a period of a month or so that I answered the phone (when caller-ID showed that it was a friend who was in on the joke) with things like "Kill the president" or "The dirty bomb is ready". ;-) This was after the news about Total Information Awareness came out (really, anyone who was surprised by the Snowden leaks hadn't been paying attention for the past decade prior... it was obvious what sort of capabilities they were working toward. Heck even back in the 1990s with Carnivore the US government was already starting down this path).
So if teh evil government are recording all this, why didn't they send someone round to check up on you and/or beat a confession out of you? It's almost like they only apply it to actual malefactors.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
THE ZIMMERMAN TELEGRAM - Barbara Tuchman
The real story of how the US entered the First World War.
And how do you know that they are "more or less spying on EVERY communication and domestic communications almost as frequently as foreign"? Of course "more or less" covers a wide range, so maybe you're right after all.
" the entire world needs to be watched"
It is perfectly legal to spy on the entire world outside of the US as far as the US is concerned.
Do you think the US is going take Russia or China to court for using SIGINT systems?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
sure he was. Any "spy" in the UK that transmitted anything would be intercepted and decrypted...
In fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
"The agents were not difficult to spot - a task made still easier by the cracking of the German's Enigma encryption. "
So yes they did spy on British citizens. I will also bet you really good money that anybody in the UK sending a telegram to Germany in 1938 had that telegram stored at Mi5
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Actually you can prove that he did.
"The agents were not difficult to spot - a task made still easier by the cracking of the German's Enigma encryption. "
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That's what all those detainees in Gitmo, and in the dark sites, are doing. It's prison labour, converting speech to text. The accuracy is terrible but the cycles are free!