A Surveillance ‘Cat-and-Mouse’ Game With AI - The Atlantic

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Anthony “Bingy” Arillotta waited years to become a made man in the Genovese crime family, and when at last the call came in August 2003, he followed directions to the letter. According to sworn testimony, Arillotta was summoned to a steak house in the Bronx, where he was made to hand over his cellphone, beeper, and jewelry before being driven to an apartment building. When he got there, he was taken to a small bathroom and strip-searched for electronic devices. For his big meeting with the boss, he was given a bathrobe to wear.<br>Until recently, only spies and criminals had to worry this obsessively about their private statements being picked up by electronic equipment. But soon, the average person might need to deploy surveillance countermeasures. The next time you conduct a delicate bit of office diplomacy or share a romantic or financial secret with a friend over drinks, a sensor built into someone’s glasses, necklace, or lapel pin might be watching you and listening.<br>In March, the tech start-up Deveillance announced the development of Spectre I, a hockey-puck-shaped device that purports to prevent others from recording you (no strip search required). The company was founded by Aida Baradari, a recent college graduate who was worried by the surge in people wearing AI-enabled recorders. These wearables can be used as a silent notetaker, a personal assistant, or even a therapist of sorts. That technology isn’t yet mainstream, but it may be soon. Apple—the company with the largest personal-tech ecosystem in the world—is rumored to be developing an AI pin or pendant that would serve as an iPhone’s constant eyes and ears; many other products of this type are on the way. AI accessories could one day be as widespread as AirPods.<br>New surveillance technologies tend to breed new countermeasures, which lead, in turn, to more sophisticated surveillance. During the Second World War, after Germany operationalized radar, the Royal Air Force began dropping thin strips of metallized paper cut to a specific size that resonated with the radar, swamping German screens with phantom echoes that were indistinguishable from real aircraft. Some historians have argued that the ensuing radar arms race was more consequential to the war’s outcome than the Manhattan Project.<br>For decades, crude jammers have been sold to people who hope to avoid being recorded. Early versions blasted loud, unpleasant white noise to conceal voices. More recently, companies have made models that emit a steady stream of ultrasonic sound at inaudible frequencies, exploiting a quirk of microphone hardware that converts those high frequencies into noise. In 2020, a team at the University of Chicago led by Yuxin Chen reported that it had mounted 23 ultrasonic transducers on a single bracelet, such that jamming signals could be sent in all directions instead of being focused on a single target.<br>Read: The most reviled tech CEO in New York confronts his haters<br>But even high-tech jammers have a hard time fending off today’s AI wearables. The most advanced pins, pendants, and glasses use speech-recovery algorithms to strip away unwanted noise, whether it originates from everyday sources—such as the clinking of glasses in a crowded bar—or from an ultrasonic jammer. This task the algorithms perform is quite difficult: In that crowded bar, a microphone on a person’s lapel will intercept sound vibrations from many different sources at once. It will pick up a bartender calling out a drink order, music emanating from a speaker, bursts of laughter coming from nearby tables—and all of these sounds ricochet off of walls and other objects, creating yet more noise. The human body solves this “cocktail party problem” without us noticing: Our ears serve as dual microphones, and our brain can use the timing and intensity differences between them, along with layered processing in the auditory cortex, to isolate the voice of a person who is sitting across from us.<br>DeLiang Wang, a computer scientist at Ohio State University, has spent decades training neural networks to accomplish that same goal, for the purpose of improving hearing aids. By feeding the networks hundreds of hours of recorded human voices, he has taught them to recognize the frequencies and rhythms of speech. The models build an internal representation of “speech-ness,” and when they encounter a noisy recording, they focus on the parts that match the patterns they have learned and then suppress everything else. The most advanced technologies can now infer missing syllables in the way that a reader fills in a redacted word from context, allowing them to reconstruct speech that wasn’t cleanly captured in the first place.<br>Big tech companies are trying to do this too. Microsoft has been running an annual Deep Noise Suppression Challenge since 2020 to advance the field. (Their in-house team is trying to make Teams meetings less...