{"id":8038,"date":"2015-05-12T06:07:53","date_gmt":"2015-05-12T11:07:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8038"},"modified":"2015-05-12T06:07:53","modified_gmt":"2015-05-12T11:07:53","slug":"the-computers-are-listening-speech-recognition-is-the-nsas-best-kept-open-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8038","title":{"rendered":"The Computers Are Listening: Speech Recognition Is the NSA’s Best-Kept Open Secret"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Computers Are Listening: Speech Recognition Is the NSA’s Best-Kept Open Secret<\/a><\/h3>\n

Second in a series. Part 1<\/em>\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Siri can understand what you say.\u00a0Google<\/a>\u00a0can take dictation. Even your newsmart TV<\/a>\u00a0is taking verbal orders.<\/p>\n

So is there any doubt the National Security Agency has the ability to translate spoken words into text?<\/p>\n

But precisely when the NSA does it, with which calls, and how often, is a well-guarded secret.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not surprising that the NSA isn\u2019t talking about it. But oddly enough, neither is anyone else: Over the years, there\u2019s been almost no public discussion of the NSA\u2019s use of automated speech recognition.<\/p>\n

One\u00a0minor exception<\/a>\u00a0was in 1999, when a young Australian cryptographer named Julian Assange stumbled across an NSA patent that mentioned \u201cmachine transcribed speech.\u201d<\/p>\n

Assange, who went on to found WikiLeaks, said at the time: \u201cThis patent should worry people. Everyone\u2019s overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most comprehensive post-Snowden descriptions of NSA\u2019s surveillance programs are strangely silent when it comes to speech recognition. The report from the\u00a0President\u2019s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies<\/a>\u00a0doesn\u2019t mention it, and neither does the October 2011\u00a0FISA Court ruling<\/a>, or the detailed reports from the\u00a0Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There is some mention of speech recognition in the\u00a0\u201cBlack Budget\u201d<\/a>submitted to Congress each year. But there\u2019s no clear sign that anybody on the Hill has ever really noticed.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0The Intercept<\/em>\u00a0reported on Tuesday<\/a>, items from the Snowden archive document the widespread use of automated speech recognition by the NSA.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Computers Are Listening: Speech Recognition Is the NSA’s Best-Kept Open Secret Second in a series. Part 1\u00a0here. Siri can understand what you say.\u00a0Google\u00a0can take dictation. Even your newsmart TV\u00a0is taking verbal orders. So is there any doubt the National Security Agency has the ability to translate spoken words into text? But precisely when the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[249,4543,2001,551,577,5359,746,765],"class_list":["post-8038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-edward-snowden","tag-intercept","tag-julian-assange","tag-national-security-agency","tag-nsa","tag-speech-recognition","tag-spying","tag-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8039,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8038\/revisions\/8039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}