Suddenly, voice conversations, historically considered ephemeral and unsearchable, can be scanned,

[midnight]

"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.


"All the secrecy has an obvious advantage for the NSA. If the NSA can keep their speech-recognition capabilities secret, nobody can tell them what to do. And if nobody knows what they are doing, then nobody can tell them to stop."

Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., arguably the foremost congressional critic of NSA overreach, wouldn’t comment directly on the question of speech recognition. But, he said through a spokesperson: “After 14 years on the Intelligence Committee, I’ve learned that senators must be constantly on the lookout for secret interpretations of the law and advances in surveillance that Congress isn’t aware of.”

He added: “For centuries, individual privacy was protected in part by the limited resources of governments. It simply wasn’t possible for governments to secretly collect information on every single citizen without investing in massive networks of spies and informants. But in the 21st century mass surveillance is no longer difficult and expensive — it’s increasingly cheap and easy. The only privacy protections that will matter in the future are the ones that are written into law and defended by public demand for freedom and openness.”


https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/11/speech-recognition-nsa-best-kept-secret/

[djean111]

1. For years, Dragon has been converting speech into text. Text can be searched at leisure.

And I have to look for links again, but Calltrunk, for example, lets you search through saved conversations -
https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/06/06/trunk-spotlight-calltrunk-for-saving-phone-conversations-to-evernote/

Calltrunk offers some innovative search technology within its own app that lets you search for words inside recorded conversations, and visually see where they appear in your conversation. That means you can listen to a section of a conversation you actually need to recall, without having to go through the whole recording.

There are others available, too, to use with land lines, you just save your conversations and then you can search through them for words. Imagine what kind of software NSA has!

This means that the NSA, or any entity NSA gives access to, can search all of your conversations, whenever they want, years later. No need to have agents hunched over a recording or an actual phone call in real time. Neat, huh?

[midnight]

2. Thank you for the link.