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.

Comments

Re:Why?

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:Why?

[TWX]

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.

Re:Why?

[GroeFaZ]

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.

false positives aren't what you think

[SethJohnson]

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.

Fairy tale

[s.petry]

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.