DARPA Wants a Searchable Database of All Your Conversations
Source: infowars.com
The ultimate privacy killer
DARPA is working on an embryonic project that would store your every verbal conversation on an Internet server, creating a searchable chat database that would represent the ultimate privacy killer.
Having failed to establish its infamous Total Information Awareness system, although the project was continued under numerous different guises, DARPA is attempting to create a world in which your every utterance is stored in perpetuity.But don’t worry, the servers on which your conversations are stored will be owned by the individual or their employer, and the government promises to never access the information using their vast new $2 billion dollar spying hub in the middle of the Utah desert. Honest.
“University of Texas computer scientist Matt Lease has studied crowdsourcing for years, including for an earlier Darpa project called Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text, or EARS, which sought to boost the accuracy of automated transcription machines. His work has also attracted enough attention for Darpa to award him a $300,000 award over two years to study the new project, called “Blending Crowdsourcing with Automation for Fast, Cheap, and Accurate Analysis of Spontaneous Speech.” The project envisions a world that is both radically transparent and a little freaky,” reports Wired’s Robert Beckhusen.
Described as being, “like a Twitter feed or e-mail archive for everyday speech,” day to day conversations, “could be stored in archives and easily searched.”
Lease claims that the technology would represent a, “democratizing force of everyday people recording and sharing their daily lives and experiences through their conversations,” and yet the Wired article barely even scratches the surface on examining what a horrendous privacy threat this would pose, with governments and police departments potentially obtaining the ability to Google-search speech.
Imagine a situation where, in the name of preventing terrorism, the Department of Homeland Security is given access to the database and uses it to search for spoken keywords, as it already does online with social networks. Forget slippery slope, this would be a rapid descent into the maelstrom of ubiquitous surveillance – the type George Orwell couldn’t even conjure up in his worst nightmare.
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Read the full article at: infowars.com
