You could do fairly accurate real time voice recognition in 2000 on a home PC. Accuracy was and is an issue, but you only need to tag interesting conversations / people not perfectly transcribe everything. Now finding the lowest cost per FLOP is complex but to be safe let's say 1k of computing can decode 10 phone calls or 100$ / call. Now the amount of time people spend on the phone varies a lot, but let's call it 5% of the time on average to be safe. Edit: each call uses 2 people. Thus somewhere around 1 billion people * .05 / 2 * 100$ = 2.5 billion you could buy the hardware to transcribe everyone's phone calls in china. As to hiding things you could keep the computers anywhere so it would be fairly easy to hide.
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.
My point wasn't that it isn't possible. I mean, who's gonna make that bet, especially on this website.
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.
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You could do fairly accurate real time voice recognition in 2000 on a home PC. Accuracy was and is an issue, but you only need to tag interesting conversations / people not perfectly transcribe everything. Now finding the lowest cost per FLOP is complex but to be safe let's say 1k of computing can decode 10 phone calls or 100$ / call. Now the amount of time people spend on the phone varies a lot, but let's call it 5% of the time on average to be safe. Edit: each call uses 2 people. Thus somewhere around 1 billion people * .05 / 2 * 100$ = 2.5 billion you could buy the hardware to transcribe everyone's phone calls in china. As to hiding things you could keep the computers anywhere so it would be fairly easy to hide.
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.
My point wasn't that it isn't possible. I mean, who's gonna make that bet, especially on this website.
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, we'd have heard from an engineer involved somewhere along the line,
If they were doing it in the US, sure. In China? I have my doubts.