How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text 164
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I call BS. (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I said, "I have a question about a charge on my bill," and it correctly connected me to the chargeback section.
it eliminated all but the keywords, and got "question", "charge" and "bill". It may only be scanning for about 20 keywords at the most at any given prompt. That's a very easy job compared to natural speech recognition which actually gets all the words. You could get that on a chip 20 years ago.
Re: I call BS. (Score:3)
So siwie just won't wecomend a westoowant for you?
Well, ... you're wrong. (Score:3)
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 searchin
Re: (Score:2)
See, you're thinking they need to perfect the technology for it to be useful, because imperfect technology is a pain in the ass for users of voice commands. But they don't. It's a different use case. Any amount of successful Speech-to-Text processing for archiving and searching is more effective than zero. They obviously would want to raise this as high as possible to avoid missing information, but they don't need perfection either. Even a 50% rate of transcription would yield a staggering amount of da
Dragon? (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Dragon is brilliant. I have the Premium version that has all the bespoke dictionaries. Yes, it's a total hog but there again I do use it to transcribe conferences. At which it is VERY good.
Re: (Score:1)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Bait and switch (Score:1)
Accents? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Can we even comment on this? (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Habeas corpus is suspended in time of war.
There is a war on drugs.
There is a war on terror/ism.
There is a war on ISI/L/S.
Three declared wars, plus oodles of undeclared police actions and incursions into sovereign terroritories, you think habeas corpus has ANY teeth??
It's better than you think (Score:1)
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 p
So what? (Score:2)
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?
The best defense against this (Score:1)
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."
Re: (Score:1)
It doesn't require perfection (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
They've been LISTENING over a decade (Score:1)
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 repl
The bomb (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
I remember when ECHELON was the big 5-eyes project that everyone was up in arms about, and someone circulated a list of key words they were supposedly flagging on, so everyone started using those in phone calls / email / web sites / etc. Eventually we discovered ECHELON wasn't as capable as thought, and was much more focused... until it got replaced by the current system.
false positives aren't what you think (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Your argument would be compelling if not for the fact that one doesn't need this technology to build historical cases or networks. Investigators are perfectly capable of using forensics to find such connections after the fact. Of course such databases will be used retroactively, to the extent possible, but the stated goal of the intelligence community is to prevent attacks before they happen, not to pick up the pieces afterwards. See, for example, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb... [pbs.org]
Re: (Score:1)
That type of work is more than forensics. It's proactively chasing up the networks to make their leadership accountable. Those are vague terms
Re: (Score:1)
Gadget security will fail (Score:2)
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
Never works quite right (Score:1)
Why would the NSA need this? (Score:2)
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?
The cold hard reality is good agents not caught (Score:1)
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.
does this really surprise anyone? (Score:2)
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 econom
Encrypt everything... (Score:1)
... for starters.
Yes, it's not a solution to the problem but it's a start.
No horror necessary (Score:2)
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.
Pranking GCHQ is a lost art (Score:2)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
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, an
Re: (Score:2)
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".
Re: (Score:2)
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... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
sure he was. Any "spy" in the UK that transmitted anything would be intercepted and decrypted...
In fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
"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
Re: (Score:2)
occasionally big industrial firms
mostly spied on big industrial firms for other big industrial firms who where paying moonlighting employees.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
This was meant to be a response to LWATCDR. Sorry for the mix up.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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 eve
Re: (Score:2)
Actually the NSA's charter is secret, so you have no idea what it precludes them from doing.
Re: (Score:2)
If I told you, I would have to kill you.
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Never said there was. My response was to the statement that any spying conducted inside the US borders was a form of treason, which I disagreed with. You in fact agree with me by saying "there must be a small list of persons which have their communications tapped, because of their political, criminal or terrorist affiliations". In fact in an earlier post in this thread I said "I think they have gone too far, but please enlighten us with clear rules to say where the line is?". The question then is what t
Re: (Score:1)
Probably gets better:
'How the NSA Converts Spoken... '
Speech to text engine (vowels):
Audible US / xlated Text
'A' / 'Terrorist!'
'E' / 'Exterminate!'
'I' / 'Jihad!'
'O' / 'Biotoxin!'
'U' / 'Constitutional terrorist'
There, now there is budget justification data for the next decade.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
" 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?
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, wrote it myself, asshole. But thanks!
Re: (Score:1)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
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 l
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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,
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Citation?
Cuban Missile Crisis
Re: (Score:2)
"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
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I second the motion.
Re: (Score:2)
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 h
Re: (Score:2)
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:
Re: (Score:3)
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,
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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).
Fairy tale (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
" 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 Jews did not really involve spying or communication intercepts.
And I counter with D-Day, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Yom Kippur war.
Re: (Score:2)
So the Cuban missile crisis cost as many lives in either Cuba or the US as the Gulags did in Russia? Wholly fuck, I know people can attempt to stretch the imagination to maintain a belief...but that is simply insanity!
Jews did involve spying, the SS and German Military implemented a "see something say something" programs and offered rewards for information on Jews in hiding. (Should ring a bell with many commercials we hear on the radio and TV today right?).
As with the first point you are stretching thing
Re: (Score:2)
Had the Cuban missile crisis gotten out of hand it could have caused a full on nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR.
Yea that would have beat the Nazis.
It is my mistake in not limiting this to the area of ComInt/SigInt/PhotoInt which what the discussion is all about.
The whole turn in the odd guy the street thing is a far different kind of "spying". Frankly one that is really looked down on by the Intelligence community at large.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Acts that prevent things from happening can never be 100% proven.
The classic example is taking the keys away from a drunk. You can not prove that you prevented an accident.
A prevented war can never be proven because it didn't happen.
"which really means nothing because we measure reality"
Okay fine using your logic.
The unrestricted arms race was perfectly safe since they were never used.
The current state of surveillance in the US and Britain is also just fine and dandy since nothing bad has happened
Re: (Score:2)
Acts that prevent things from happening can never be 100% proven.
The classic example is taking the keys away from a drunk. You can not prove that you prevented an accident.
Absolutely correct, and exactly the point of my response. Not only can you not prove you prevented an accident but you can't claim "a billion people would have died if we didn't take their keys", which you just did with the Cuban Missile crisis.
You attempted to claim that spying has saved more lives than it has cost, which is contradictory to _ALL_ evidence and historical data. Pay attention to that! Not "some", but all historical data shows you are wrong. Your defense for your claim is based in a hypot
Re: (Score:2)
No I am claiming that the spying prevented the Cuban missile crisis from getting out of hand. It is also many historians opinions that it also prevented the Yom Kippur war from getting out of hand.
It also saved many lives in the battle of the Atlantic during WWII and helped the Allies win WWII.
So "which is contradictory to _ALL_ evidence and historical data."
No it is not.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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 informat
Re: (Score:1)
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.
Or end-to-end encryption (Score:2)
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 th