NSA has its own search engine for content of telephone conversations

The NSA has its own search engine that can be used to analyze tapped conversations on a large scale. They can be searched for suspicious phrases or words. Internally, the government calls the system ‘Google for Speech’.

The NSA would have tapped calls from landlines, mobile connections and VoIP processed through a system using speech recognition. The content of the conversations is then analyzed for suspicious patterns. That reports The Intercept, the website of journalist Glenn Greenwald, based on revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

It is unclear how many conversations are stored and analysed, but it is certain that the technology is used in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The technique would also be used in Latin America to collect information about drug criminals.

The technology would have been rigged after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York; conversations would still be worked out manually for this. The system would not work in all cases, but according to NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, conversations are nevertheless much more accessible thanks to the system.