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Speech Recognition Is NSA's Best-Kept Open Secret - The Intercept

Speech Recognition Is The NSA's Best-Kept Open Secret
Adam Goldberg
By 

Senior Front Page Editor, HuffPost

FILE - In this June 6, 2013 file photo, a sign stands outside the National Security Agency (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md. There was a break in the case of a man who fired shots on several occupied vehicles and the headquarters of the NSA when he returned to the scene of the first shooting, police said Wednesday. The 35-year-old Prince George's County man was arrested Tuesday night near Arundel Mills mall, where shots were fired Feb. 24. A man driving away from a gas station near the mall was injured by glass shot out from his car, police said. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
FILE - In this June 6, 2013 file photo, a sign stands outside the National Security Agency (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md. There was a break in the case of a man who fired shots on several occupied vehicles and the headquarters of the NSA when he returned to the scene of the first shooting, police said Wednesday. The 35-year-old Prince George's County man was arrested Tuesday night near Arundel Mills mall, where shots were fired Feb. 24. A man driving away from a gas station near the mall was injured by glass shot out from his car, police said. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

Siri can understand what you say. Google can take dictation. Even your new smart TV is taking verbal orders.

So is there any doubt the National Security Agency has the ability to translate spoken words into text?

But precisely when the NSA does it, with which calls, and how often, is a well-guarded secret.

It’s not surprising that the NSA isn’t talking about it. But oddly enough, neither is anyone else: Over the years, there’s been almost no public discussion of the NSA’s use of automated speech recognition.

One minor exception was in 1999, when a young Australian cryptographer named Julian Assange stumbled across an NSA patent that mentioned “machine transcribed speech.”

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