Jonathan Wienke wrote:

At 09:06 PM 10/31/97 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:

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Now police have an electronic witness that can provide similar assistance: a device called SECURES that pinpoints the time and location of gunshots.

In order for this system to be worth anything, it would have to be able to: ... 3. Monitor conversations throughout the coverage area. A suspicious sound preceded by a male voice saying "Give me your money, bitch" would be much more interesting than one preceded by a revving engine. This would have the added benefits of allowing LEO's to track fugitives via the sound of their footsteps, their breathing, vehicle engine sounds, etc., as well as gathering voiceprint data from crimes in progress.

I think point 3 is the scariest. A properly designed system could do voiceprint analysis of almost every word spoken in public, tie the conversations to the identities of the speakers, and archive the time, location, content and participants of every spoken conversation for long periods of time in a database that could be searched by keyword, speaker identity, time, and/or location. The following searches could be done:

1. "I want a list of everyone who uttered the words 'buy' and 'crack' in the same sentence between 2100 and 0330 hours within 500 feet of 123 Maple Drive between August 7 and December 5."

2. "I want a list of all participants in conversations with Citizen-Unit 754-35-9710 which included the phrase 'BATF agent' in the last 6 months.

3. "I want a map of Citizen-Unit 754-35-9710's movements for the last 2 weeks." ...

Jonathan has hit on a point which illustrates the danger of the surveillance technologies that are _already_ in place, vis a vis, the Internet. Something lost in the euphoria over the citizen's radical new ability to access information: Yahoo Search--"Posts by _me_." is that the same technolgy, and more, is at the fingertips of the proverbial 4 Horsemen AND (now for the _really_ bad news) at the fingertips of "John Law, the Citizen's Friend." Sadly, "garbage in--garbage out" _has_ always, and _will_ always, result(ed) in such inanities as Drug Counselors being 'rated' at the same level as Drug Dealers when the computer spits out the results of a badly structured "search for the _bad_guys_." Naturally, when the police mistakenly kick in the door of a Drug Counselor, it is always a 'regretable tragedy' when they shoot holes in the ten year old boy in the hallway who is holding an over-ripe banana which 'looked like a weapon.' (Almost a true life example, told to me by a friend who left her career in law enforcement because she was still in possession of a conscience which was capable of recognizing that children killed by those who are 'just following orders' are just as dead as the children killed by those who are 'out of control.') {The person in question 'pulled' her shot at the last moment, upon realizing she was about to murder a child with a banana. Because the banana "could have been a weapon," an investigation was not required for an officer firing upon an unarmed citizen. I regard this lady as a wonderful example of someone who has held themself to a higher standard than their government regulators and their peers. What is a shame is that someone who _should_ be the type of person charged with protecting us had to leave the system because there is no future for those who choose sanity, logic and humanity over 'following orders.'} If you stop to consider Jonathan's examples of (paraphrased), "give me the names of every citizen in location 'A' at time 'B' who has used the word 'normal' in an email in the last ten years, etc., etc." in light of Internet search engine capabilities being extended to such technologies as 'citizen physical location monitoring', 'voice recognition', 'DNA pattern analysis' (e.g. heriditary potential for violence, etc.), then the future may be very scary, indeed. Think about this: "Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the person who is reading this post is the 'only' individual, out of over 20 million processed by the Never Wrong Criminal Identification Compter System, who is in the post reader's general location, today, has completed their high school education and has a family member who has committed murder in the last five generations." (What? You claim you are not the _only_ person in New York City, with a high school education. Nice try, pal, but the computer is never wrong.) "Although no murder has been committed yet, statistics show that someone in that area will be, within the next two days, so I ask that you return a verdict of 'Guilty of murder in the first degree' and we will pick up and execute the reader of this post as soon as a body turns up." ...in light of _this_: A citizen was found guilty of murder by a jury, based on the slim eyewitness testimony of a passerby who caught a fleeting glimpse of the murderer, despite testimony from over a dozen people that the defendant was, at the time of the murder, attending a wedding thousands of miles away. Some of those giving testimony did not even know the man prior to meeting him at the wedding, and were in no way related to the man, but the jury was still swayed by the prosecutor's claim that this wide variety of law-abiding, average citizens were lying to try and protect the defendant. Do you have a great-great-grandfather who committed murder? Then you are, by heridity, a potential murderer. It's in your blood! This is '10 points against' you. All of the kindness you have don in your life does not count in your favor, because any fool can see that it was done in an attempt to trick the jury.

The Big Brother potential of such a system should be obvious. What is really scary is that such a system could be built mostly with currently existing hardware, and at most a few man-years of software development. If each node in the network performs its own speech to text conversion and archiving, and coordinates with a central voiceprint ID server, (which could also provide the sync signal that the nodes would use to cross-reference between nodes to locate sounds) each node could consist of a Pentium 200 with some specialized audio signal processing cards and 15-20 GB of storage. The only really new thing required would be an .AVI-style format for storing MPEG audio, a text transcript of said audio (which would need to include keywords for gunshots, passing vehicles, and other events of interest), and location coordinates (updated on a second to second basis) which could be indexed for reasonably efficient searching.

Of course, Jonathan is a raving lunatic for suggesting these outlandish possibilities, much like the mentally unstable people who history records as believing that one day people would be able to send electromagnetic waves through the atmosphere and have their images and voices appear on machines in distant places. Seriously, history has shown that any technology capable of being used for great evil _will_ be used for great evil. The reason that technology radically increases the ante in the game between good and evil is that if one 'evil' person is in control of technology that ten million 'good' people do not have access to, then the basic humanity or inhumanity of humankind, in general, is really not an important part of the equation which will determine the future. (I challenge all other cypherpunks to a fistfight, the only rule being that I can use an Uzi, and you can't.) Remember...when all is said and done, my dad was an optomist. George Orwelle Jr.