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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.
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.
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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.
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.
ME? Certainly not. It didn't happen until vista that speech recognition was brought to perfection
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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.
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
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"
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.
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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.
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
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.
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
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.