[sudo-discuss] Dystopia Watch: Surveillance drones coming to a cafe near you.

Anon195714 anon195714 at sbcglobal.net
Tue Mar 5 14:22:24 PST 2013 

Re. Anthony, Rachel, Matthew, re "masking audio."

That was the first thing I tried when I found out about NSA's voice
recognition back in 1980 (if I recall correctly it was the October 1980
issue of _The Progressive_ that referred to the HARVEST program, keyword
rec and voice rec, and some stuff in a British paper or magazine also, I
may still have copies around). 

The idea was that instead of using a voice scrambler or crypto (which
required a device at each end of a conversation), voice rec could be
defeated from one end of a phone call by saturating the channel with
just enough noise.  What killed that idea was the fact that long
distance telephony used T-carrier that split up the conversation into
two different speech paths between telco central offices (e.g. me to
you, you to me).  So a device would still be needed at both ends, and
one may as well just use a scrambler.  That led me down the trail to
details about scramblers (bottom line, analog scramblers aren't any
good) and ultimately to cryptography by 1982 - 1983. 

Re. "every person's voice has a distinct signature that can be
recognized...", yes, thus voiceprint recognition, which was 99.6%
accurate in 1960 according to an article in _Telephony_ magazine at the
time (I may still have that around also).  Fast-forward to today at the
speed of Moore's law, and you can be quite sure that voiceprint
recognition is used for tracking. 

This is one of the things I find most pernicious about the decline in
the use of landlines and the rise in the number of people with "mobile
only":  A landline enables you to design, build, connect, and use any
hardware you choose, including digital voice crypto devices, and
including computers running digital voice crypto.  And with a landline
phone, when the receiver is on the hook, the microphone is physically
disconnected by the hookswitch, a visible set of switch contacts inside
the phone. 

Mobile devices are sealed black boxes, the ultimate revenge against
phone phreaks & phone hackers, where you have no final control over
what's in the black box.  Just like the bad old days of Ma Bell when it
was quasi-illegal to connect "foreign attachments" to your home phone
line.  Even a voice crypto app on a mobile device is questionable at
best, because you have no way of knowing if at some level it's being
undermined by something else in the device that you can't detect.  By
analogy, crypto on your laptop, but a keystroke logger hiding between
you and the crypto app. 

The mere possibility of being able to hack the hardware provides more
security than any sealed box, and best of all is when you can design &
build your own hardware, such as when people build their own desktop
machines from components. 

Anyway, I agree with Rachel & Matthew that audio masking isn't
sufficient because it can be undone by the watchers.  It may have to do
in some situations, but it would be better to design more "aggressive"
personal defense tech such as wearable "resonant audio cannons" or
something else. 

-G.


=====


On 13-03-05-Tue 11:21 AM, Matthew D. Howell wrote:
> @Rachel The state of the technology for recognizing and separating
> patterns in audio is advanced enough to overcome that sort of thing.
> Every person's voice has a distinct signature that can be recognized.
> I would venture a guess that some kind of encrypted digital signal
> transmission would be the best way to keep any sonic communication
> private in the most extreme of situations. (most interested party with
> the best technology at their disposal)
> – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – >8
> /V\ /-\ + +  |–| ø \/\/ ∂ £ £
> –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
> Matthew D. Howell
> misterinterrupt, tHe M4d swiTcH, the RuinMechanic
> cell: (617) 755-1481
> –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 11:16 AM, rachel lyra hospodar
> <rachelyra at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wouldn't it need to be non-commercially available music, so they couldn't
>> just find the audio data of the track, invert its wave, and cancel it out of
>> the recording?
>>
>> CACOPHONY FOR THE REVOLUTION!
>>
>> mediumreality.com
>>
>> On Mar 5, 2013 10:23 AM, "Steve Berl" <steveberl at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> You could carry a boombox around playing loud music where ever you go.
>>> Perhaps this would be the end of earbuds. :-)
>>>
>>> On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 10:20 AM, Anthony Di Franco <di.franco at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> People have rendered surveillance cameras useless with very bright IR
>>>> LEDs in their fields of view.
>>>> Could something similar be done for sound recording devices?
>>>>
>>>> On Mar 5, 2013 6:17 AM, "Anon195714" <anon195714 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Yo's-
>>>>>
>>>>> Something I forgot to add re. DARPA's desire for universal recording of
>>>>> face-to-face conversations.
>>>>>
>>>>> What's the ideal device for doing all that recording?
>>>>>
>>>>> How'bout something you wear?  How'bout something that "everyone" wears?,
>>>>> or even a significant fraction of "everyone"?
>>>>>
>>>>> Like maybe Google Glasses.
>>>>>
>>>>> Always on, camera and mic always "connected" to "the cloud."  Orwell's
>>>>> telescreen gone mobile.
>>>>>
>>>>> Everyone who wears them will become, in effect, _unpaid surveillance
>>>>> drones_ watching their family and friends, not from up in the sky, but
>>>>> from up close where every word can be heard.
>>>>>
>>>>> Some will say "oh, there's no stopping technology." People said that
>>>>> about the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb.  But public outcry led
>>>>> first to treaties and then to progressive degrees of nuclear
>>>>> disarmament.  We haven't used that technology since it was first used in
>>>>> WW2.
>>>>>
>>>>> We can stop pernicious tech if we choose.  We can refuse, we can
>>>>> withdraw consent, we do not have to press the Buy button.
>>>>>
>>>>> Technology should liberate and empower people.  "Conveniences with a few
>>>>> strings attached" are not liberation, they're puppet-strings.
>>>>>
>>>>> It's all about control: technology that you can control, vs. technology
>>>>> that can control you.
>>>>>
>>>>> -G.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> =====
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 13-03-05-Tue 1:50 AM, Anon195714 wrote:
>>>>>> 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.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>>> sudo-discuss at lists.sudoroom.org
>>>>>> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
>>>>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> -steve
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