4 ms·

Who's to say the NSA wouldn't just add their own hotwords to the "extremely low-power hotword detection"?

s_q_b 13y ago
Sure, but that's a little different than listening to everything. Not to mention trivial to detect. Just watch CPU consumption and start spouting off trigger words.
- joenathan 13y ago
  >Sure, but that's a little different than listening to everything. The NSA never cared about listening to everything, that would be completely unmanageable, flagging conversations with key phrases has always been the course of action. >Not to mention trivial to detect. Just watch CPU consumption and start spouting off trigger words. It'd also be trivial to detect that you were using a CPU usage monitor and turn off those keywords, viruses do these sorts of things all the time to avoid detection.
  - drivebyacct2 13y ago
    >The NSA never cared about listening to everything, that would be completely unmanageable Someone sure hasn't been paying attention.
  - s_q_b 13y ago
    That's not correct. Since 2001, the NSA has been retasked to recording all SIGINT information, and figure out what's relevant later. This was the reasoning behind NSA Total Information Awareness (hence the name,) as well as its successor programs including PRISM, FAIRVIEW, MARINA, BASKETBALL, etc. Also, if you want an undectable CPU monitor, just use a temperature sensor strapped to the processor. Temp-monitoring was even used to find TOR hidden services.
cromwellian 13y ago
They could, but there's also a high chance of discovery. Also, blanket recording hotwords from millions and millions of phones is likely to result in so many false positives as to make the system useless. For any kind of system to be workable, it's likely they'd have to narrow it down considerably to suspect users. Someone calling the phone number of a person or organization known to be N-degrees separated from real known targets is more likely to yield fruit than scooping up voice conversations from every phone that heard the phrase "bomb making"

s_q_b 13y ago

Sure, but that's a little different than listening to everything. Not to mention trivial to detect. Just watch CPU consumption and start spouting off trigger words.

joenathan 13y ago
>Sure, but that's a little different than listening to everything. The NSA never cared about listening to everything, that would be completely unmanageable, flagging conversations with key phrases has always been the course of action. >Not to mention trivial to detect. Just watch CPU consumption and start spouting off trigger words. It'd also be trivial to detect that you were using a CPU usage monitor and turn off those keywords, viruses do these sorts of things all the time to avoid detection.
- drivebyacct2 13y ago
  >The NSA never cared about listening to everything, that would be completely unmanageable Someone sure hasn't been paying attention.
- s_q_b 13y ago
  That's not correct. Since 2001, the NSA has been retasked to recording all SIGINT information, and figure out what's relevant later. This was the reasoning behind NSA Total Information Awareness (hence the name,) as well as its successor programs including PRISM, FAIRVIEW, MARINA, BASKETBALL, etc. Also, if you want an undectable CPU monitor, just use a temperature sensor strapped to the processor. Temp-monitoring was even used to find TOR hidden services.

cromwellian 13y ago

They could, but there's also a high chance of discovery. Also, blanket recording hotwords from millions and millions of phones is likely to result in so many false positives as to make the system useless. For any kind of system to be workable, it's likely they'd have to narrow it down considerably to suspect users. Someone calling the phone number of a person or organization known to be N-degrees separated from real known targets is more likely to yield fruit than scooping up voice conversations from every phone that heard the phrase "bomb making"