5 Mar
2013
5 Mar
'13
1:50 a.m.
Yo's-
This just in:
"DARPA wants to make [voice recognition/transcription] systems so
accurate, you’ll be able to easily record, transcribe and recall all the
conversations you ever have. ... Imagine living in a world where every
errant utterance you make is preserved forever. ... DARPA [awarded
U.Texas comp sci researcher Matt Lease]... $300,000... over two years to
study the new project, called “Blending Crowdsourcing with Automation
for Fast, Cheap, and Accurate Analysis of Spontaneous Speech.”"
"The idea is that business meetings or even conversations with your
friends and family could be stored in archives and easily searched. The
stored recordings could be held in servers, owned either by individuals
or their employers. ... The answer, Lease says, is in widespread use of
recording technologies like smartphones, cameras and audio recorders...
[A] memorandum from the Congressional Research Service described [an
earlier DARPA project of this type known as] EARS, as focusing on speech
picked up from broadcasts and telephone conversations, “as well as
extract clues about the identity of speakers” for “the military,
intelligence and law enforcement communities.”"
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/03/darpa-speech/ (Yes, "real geeks
don't read Wired," but nonetheless its news pages are useful for keeping
a finger on the pulse of Big Brother and his corporate Brethren.)
In short:
DARPA is researching the means by which every conversation you have,
in-person, whether at work or with family or friends, gets picked up by
the mic in your smartphone or other portable device, and stored on a
server, where DARPA's algorithms and human editors turn all of it into
fast-searchable text, that could be used by your employer, the military,
law enforcement, and intel agencies. Presumably the credit bureaus,
insurance companies, and financial institutions will want "in" on the
data as well.
Now connect that with this, about cell-site tracking and call detail
records:
"The government maintained [that] Americans have no expectation of
privacy of such cell-site records [call detail records or CDR] because
they are in the possession of a third party — the mobile phone companies."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/gps-drug-dealer-retrial/
The key point is that the gov's current position is that data stored on
a third party's servers have "no expectation of privacy." What begins
with CDR will eventually include voicemail messages stored on the mobile
phone companies' servers, and then eventually all of your live in-person
conversations that are stored "in the cloud."
"Anything you say can and will be used against you..." Mark my words.
Meanwhile people keep using gmail and Google Voice, and smartphones from
which they can't remove the batteries. Because nothing is more important
than "convenience," right?
As a character in a sci-fi piece I wrote in the mid-1980s said, "Why put
a person in prison, when you can put prison in the person instead?"
-G.