What if spies could decode sound vibrations passing through leaves, water and other everyday objects?

Spies of the future will use algorithms to gather information that humans could never dream of capturing. In an astounding breakthrough, scientists are learning how to decode "intelligible speech" by analyzing videotaped sound vibrations.

Science Daily has more:

Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass. In other experiments, they extracted useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water, and even the leaves of a potted plant.”

Future Spy
by Ellysiumn

In this hypothetical future, no space would be completely sound-proof. To keep a secret, you would have to control your invisible vibrations.

This technology could also be used to reconstruct conversations from silent movies and Super-8 cameras.

But that’s not all. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell proved that they could use portable cameras on wearable devices like Google Glass to capture and decode passwords.

Wired has more about this breakthrough:

They could use video from wearables like Google Glass and the Samsung smartwatch to surreptitiously pick up four-digit PIN codes typed onto an iPad from almost 10 feet away—and from nearly 150 feet with a high-def camcorder. Their software, which used a custom-coded video recognition algorithm that tracks the shadows from finger taps, could spot the codes even when the video didn’t capture any images on the target devices’ displays.”

I Spy
by lmi2

Since future dream research will soon be identifying future killers who can be incarcerated and exterminated in their childhoods before they can even imagine what criminality they were going to commit, and since nanotechnology will soon give us a world of super abundance in which all our fears about global weather change and peak oil and fracking will be silly memories of our silly do–gooder forebears… there doesn’t seem to be anything for a good citizen to get all outraged about these days.

The scientists (well, a distinct fraction of them, and I’d like to examine their diplomas) and nerd “futurologists” seem to be bringing everything to order in a much more orderly and “feel–good” fashion than Adolf and Benito ever came close to achieving. So why spend the workers’ tax–revenues on “vibration translation” rather than autism? Could it be that as new models for “income reform” supplant dated “capitalism,” our less–than–1% ruling class needs new ways to survive and thrive beyond their splintering old economic and military models? Secrets in our heads just might be the next great natural resource to be tapped by our controllers. And whether by pension check, policemen, drones or knowledge of our every desire—this world is still about the controllers and the controlled.