The NSA’s voice-recognition system raises hard questions for Echo and Google Home

Suppose you’re looking for a single person, somewhere in the world. (We’ll call him Waldo.) You know who he is, nearly everything about him, but you don’t know where he’s hiding. How do you find him?
But the Echo and the Home weren’t made with the NSA in mind. Google and Amazon were trying to build useful assistants, and they likely didn’t consider that it could also be a tool of surveillance. Even more, they didn’t consider that a person’s voice might be something they would have to protect. Like ad-targeting and cloud hosting itself, what started as information technology is turning into a system of surveillance and control. What happens next is up to Google, Amazon, and their customers.