Someone May Be Listening to Your Keyboard

Posted on September 19, 2005 in Folly Watch Human Rights

Up until now, you could disconnect your computer from the Internet, type a document, print it out for circulation to one person who promptly burns it, and erase the file and double erase the file so that no one could know other than you and the recipient what the message said. But along came researchers at the University of California at Berkeley:

Doug Tygar of the University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues used a standard microphone to record 10 minutes of noise generated by computer typists. Because the sound generated by each keystroke is slightly different, the researchers were able to generate a computer program to decode what was written. “Using statistical learning theory, the computer can categorize the sound of each key as it’s struck and develop a good first guess with an accuracy of 60 percent for characters, and 20 percent for words,” explains team member Li Zhuang also of U.C. Berkeley. “We then use spelling and grammar check to refine the result, which increased the accuracy to 70 percent and the word accuracy to 50 percent.”

Tygar goes on to warn people about the use of the technology by “people with less than honorable intentions”. Like members of the Bush Administration, for example? I wonder about the integrity of any scientist who conducts such research in an era when individual rights are being trampled upon. It reminds me of Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle in which an imprisoned scientist earns his liberty by creating a device for tracing phone calls — which in turn leads to another man being imprisoned for the crime of warning a friend of his impending arrest. The new prisoner is given an old child’s bowl showing a cat watching a bird, the cat being the State and the little bird himself. The First Circle was one of three novels mentioned when Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize and it was often cited in condemnation of the Soviet system.

In those days, we thought the loss of human rights could not happen here. We had the recent legacy of the Warren Court to assure ourselves that no erroristic and oppressive creeps such as the ones who misgovern us now could invade our privacy. America’s liberals and moderates slept while neoconservatives undid the fabric of liberty with tweezers. If you said anything about their rending, you were laughed off as a paranoid. Then came the Age of Gizmoism and researchers such as Tygar and Li invented new spy devices not for any common good, but just to see if they could do it.

There are ways to confound the system: you can use shift, control or a caps lock. I wonder about irregular typists or keyboards owned by people like me who pound them until the wiring falls out. Perhaps changing a keyboard from QWERTY to Dvorak or to one’s own unique configuation can throw the blind spy off — for a time. Hackers will devise other methods for protecting their privacy. The question — the big question — is why would any researcher in this time of eroding civil liberties would devote her or his time to inventing such a technology? Our government is so concerned about crime and retaining the privileges of the rich that it is willing to throw off civil rights and privacy as so much baggage. Why make them better able to do this?

In this era when incompentency has replaced integrity scientists have better things to do. Funding should be focused once more on health, education, and the environment, on fixing levees along the coast and shoring up buildings in earthquake zones, on providing health care for all Americans, on aiding families living in poverty, on developing alternatives to oil dependence, on restoring the light that was once American education. Instead of these goals, we have concentrated the wealth of our government devices designed to increase our effectiveness in killing and invading our privacy.

The cat is watching you. Fly little bird. If you can.