Phones should all be considered non secure communications.
As I recall during the cold war, the government had the ability to turn on phones mics when the phone receivers were replaced or hung up.
you are correct.
add a dedicated program to process any gathered audio into text... and open the mic for constant sampling. once the audio is in text format, route it to processing to be indexed and scored against a phrase matching database. anything above a certain level would be automatically routed to the attending agent.
and yes, i could implement such a system
I occasionally worked in a place which had two buttons in the middle of the phone's handset. They had to be pressed to connect the microphone and speaker. My fingers would cramp if I had to be on the phone for more than a couple minutes.
What a bunch of perverts. I am sure some of them are listening in on bedroom phones, to get their jollies, while husbands and wives are doing what husbands and wives do in their own bedrooms, and I don't mean sleeping.
“As I recall during the cold war, the government had the ability to turn on phones mics when the phone receivers were replaced or hung up.”
Not unless they actually modified your phone. The line was actually broken by relay when the phone was placed in the cradle. This was true through the late 80s-early 90s. Newer phones are almost all digital and might be vulnerable to that. The old ones, nope.