Interpol’s New Software Will Recognize Criminals by Their Voices

link

The world’s largest police network is evaluating software that would match samples of speech taken from phone calls or social media posts to voice recordings of criminals stored within a massive database shared by law enforcement agencies.

While the system can process any “lawfully intercepted” sound, including ambient conversation, its expected use would be to match voices gleaned from telephone and social media against a “blacklist” database. The samples could come from mobile, landline, or voice-over-Internet-protocol recordings, or from snatches of audio captured from recruitment or propaganda videos posted to social media.

The platform can also match voice samples taken from social media platforms including Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook. By combing through multimedia content based on search criteria such as language relevance and geolocation, the system will tag and process this material, and find similar clips in the database. The software’s video processing engine can extract the audio from an online video, split it into mono, and format it into uncompressed 16 kilohertz WAV files. Audio-only content can also be searched and tagged in this way.

This analysis could also be considered a warning, given recent concerns about companies hoovering data from social media platforms like Facebook. As the activist Monroy points out, the general public is only recently aware of the huge extent to which their written communication can be monitored and filtered for keywords. “They should know that this works with speech as well,” he says.

Some more fairly terrifying surveillance technogy being tested and approved in the world. I personally would like to know what "lawfully intercepted sound" implies. I imagine the definition of that will be changed and stretched to whatever they need it for....

Don't be a criminal, nothing to worry about.

I have to always wonder about the thread makers worrying about this kind of thing.

originally posted by: Jefferton
Don't be a criminal, nothing to worry about.

I have to always wonder about the thread makers worrying about this kind of thing.

Well I could go on some long winded explanation about the inaccuracy of voice recognition, the potential for mis-ID, the potential for abuse or spying, the fact that this is an international police force with this technology, the fact that some people may just have really similar voices....the fact that saying don't be a criminal is stupid when not using a crosswalk or a hundred other stupid things like that people do everyday technically makes you a criminal.

But...instead I'm going to be sarcastic and say....you know I always wonder what kinds of lives the people that are totally unconcerned with invasive police surveillance live...they must be really #ing boring. Or they must just be entirely oblivious to all of the abuses of power that go on in law enforcement agencies.

Tomorrow's News Today ...

Police raided the home of an elderly couple yesterday looking for a wanted fugitive. Although the fugitive, Michael Winslow, was not present at the residence, police did find broken garbage disposal, a pair of cats fighting, and a mattress with bad springs.

Police now suspect that Mr. Winslow may be hiding out at a local arcade with Seth McFarlane.

a reply to: VictorVonDoom

Tomorrow's News Today: part two...

Metro police invaded the home of Bob Shineeknob today, after information came to light, from an anonymous source.
Apparently: someone had attempted to call Bob, and telco software picked-up the voice of a criminal from the answering machine: Vito Corleone.

The message said: "Bob's not home right now. I made him an offer, he couldn't refuse."