You'd need datacentre after datacentre after datacentre, surely?
Also, state of the art voice recognition is still flakey in a silent, echo free room using a condenser mic. Imagine how flakey its going to be going over chinese copper and GSM codecs. False positives ahoy! Even the chinese govt. has a maximum acceptable false positive rate for this kind of thing.
I haven't believed in this rumour all my life so far when it's been the US govt. claimed to have been doing it, and I don't believe it now that its switched to being the chinese govt. Not without some evidence.
It doesn't even make logical sense. Assuming you could actually do this, why cut the calls off? Why not record them as part of wider evidence gathering?
PS: I would assume you could probably do it for a lot less but these numbers where just to show it's possible. Doing something like this in the US for ~750 million is going to be vary tempting, but I think the manpower costs for false positives may be the real issue.
It was more that it would be impossible to do without it being flamboyantly obvious that you're doing it. I was referring to 'hiding' in terms of infosec as opposed to 'hiding' in terms of physically stashing away the boxes.
If they were doing it, we'd have heard from an engineer involved somewhere along the line, as opposed to rumours originating from paranoid citizens.
If they were doing it in the US, sure. In China? I have my doubts.
I doubt the Chinese would approach this in such a blunt manner. But I'm sure the Chinese government has lists of known and likely dissidents, and they probably have access to social network graphs for those individuals.
So you monitor likely dissidents who are hubs of major social networks more aggressively. For people who present randomly marginal political risk or low impact because of a limited social network, they get monitored less aggressively or with random sampling, etc.
Anyway, if such a thing was implemented, I wonder if it could drive a set of language shifts. E.g., people stop saying "prison", they say "pickle jar"; they stop saying "informant", they say "cockroach"; etc.
The calls are cut off because it's simple and effective. If people can communicate and organize, the damage is already done and you have to respond with force to stop protests. But if you can prevent protests from ever being organized in the first place...
Could you expand on this? Or just give me some key terms that I can look up to get more info. Sounds very interesting.
EDIT: Also, I don't buy the argument that dropping the calls is simple and effective. The antigovernment types are simply going to start using trivial codewords, like every criminalised person throughout history has done. Therefore it will barely touch them.
However it will drive businesses, both chinese and foreign, crazy. They are not interested in codewords. If you criminalise free speech, only criminals will speak freely.
In particular, Fourier transforms, wavelet transforms, cepstrum transforms, subband filtering, and principal component analysis are techniques common to both audio compression and speech recognition.
The goverenment is certainly experimenting with such a system in one or two regions, along with their pervasive cameras and face recognition.
However, seeing as the government here seems to have some difficulty building a road on time, on budget, that is actually decent quality it seems unlikely that they'll get this working.
Your time is coming to an end. You can try to initimidate, and beat down dissent all you want. But in the end, freedom will prevail. But to hell with it, Neo said it better:
"I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you."
"We're having the happy fun obedience rally at six PM."
A->B: "pickles is the new word for f-r-e-e s-p-e-e-c-h. free speech."
<forbidden word detected: free speech. call terminated>
B->A: "So, we were talking about pickles... "
In the Middle East forbidden words and topics get their own 2nd secret language to avoid censorship.
I assume that in China the same cultural effect is in play so what idiot would use the full non allowed words?
The story sounds somewhat questionable..
That is why in the Middle East class are recorded and not dropped as everyone is using a 2nd secret language to talk about forbidden subjects.
