According
to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the NSA
can automatically recognize and flag content in phone calls, using what
it calls "Google for Voice." And though the technology, which they've
been working on for at least a decade, is still imperfect, it can
significantly aid human analysts in sifting through vast amounts
of data.
The amount of time needed for a human to listen to audio and transcribe it has always been prohibitive when collecting audio for surveillance.
Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who worked as a voice processing crypto-linguist at the Agency, told the Intercept that, despite the post 9-11 push to start collecting more audio communications, the limiting factor was having people to listen to them all.
"There weren’t enough ears," he said.
But recent explosive advances in voice recognition technology could change all that, with the age of "bulk listening" on the horizon.
"I think people don’t understand that the economics of surveillance have totally changed," Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told the Intercept.
"Once you have this capability, then the question is: How will it be
deployed?" she said. "Can you temporarily cache all American phone
calls, transcribe all the phone calls, and do text searching of the
content of the calls? It may not be what they are doing right now,
but they’ll be able to do it."
Storable & Searchable, Across Languages & Accents
Though the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started funding voice recognition in the 1970s, the last decade or so are when the technology really took off.
However, Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, insists that the technology — especially as applied to phone call audio — is far from perfect, because "there’s a lot of noise on the signal" and "it’s informal as hell."
The amount of time needed for a human to listen to audio and transcribe it has always been prohibitive when collecting audio for surveillance.
Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who worked as a voice processing crypto-linguist at the Agency, told the Intercept that, despite the post 9-11 push to start collecting more audio communications, the limiting factor was having people to listen to them all.
"There weren’t enough ears," he said.
But recent explosive advances in voice recognition technology could change all that, with the age of "bulk listening" on the horizon.
"I think people don’t understand that the economics of surveillance have totally changed," Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, told the Intercept.
Mark my words again...every time you use #SIRI or #Googlevoice the #NSA captures this data and converts it to text adding it to your dossier
— END PRISM (@endprism) May 5, 2015
How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text http://t.co/sTTMPToIhK by @froomkin
— END PRISM (@endprism) May 5, 2015
Documents
leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA has
technology to convert recorded conversations to text that can be
searched for terms like "detonator", "Baghdad", or "Musharaf."
Though the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started funding voice recognition in the 1970s, the last decade or so are when the technology really took off.
However, Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, insists that the technology — especially as applied to phone call audio — is far from perfect, because "there’s a lot of noise on the signal" and "it’s informal as hell."
Post a Comment Blogger Facebook Disqus