Good Morning! I have 3 articles for you on the NSA’s speech recognition program today.
First, an intro on the program:
THE COMPUTERS ARE LISTENING: HOW THE NSA CONVERTS SPOKEN WORDS INTO SEARCHABLE TEXT
Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.
But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.
Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.
Jump!
Next up, more on this little mentioned program:
THE COMPUTERS ARE LISTENING: SPEECH RECOGNITION IS NSA’S BEST-KEPT OPEN SECRET
As The Intercept reported on Tuesday, items from the Snowden archive document the widespread use of automated speech recognition by the NSA.
The strategic advantage, invasive potential and policy implications of being able to turn spoken words into text are not trivial: Suddenly, voice conversations, historically considered ephemeral and unsearchable, can be scanned, catalogued and archived – not perfectly, but well enough to dramatically increase the effective scope of eavesdropping.
Former senior NSA executive turned whistleblower Thomas Drake, who’s seen NSA’s automated speech recognition at work, says the silence is telling.
“You’re seeing a black hole,” Drake told The Intercept. “That means there’s something there that’s really significant. You’re seeing some of the fuzzy contours of this whole other program.”
Finally, an article on one thing you can do to protect your privacy:
HOW TO KEEP NSA COMPUTERS FROM TURNING YOUR PHONE CONVERSATIONS INTO SEARCHABLE TEXT
The solution, as it is to so many other outrageously invasive U.S. government tactics exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is, of course, Congressional legislation.
I kid, I kid.
No, the real solution is end-to-end encryption, preferably of the unbreakable kind.
And as luck would have it, you can have exactly that on your mobile phone, for the price of zero dollars and zero cents.
So how you doin’? 😀