Stanford's MetaPhone Project: Crowdsourcing Metadata To Challenge the NSA

An anonymous reader writes "'When the first NSA surveillance story broke in June,' writes Dennis Fisher at Threatpost, 'most people likely had never heard the word metadata before. Even some security and privacy experts weren't sure what the term encompassed.' The NSA and its supporters have, of course, emphasized that phone records collection is 'not surveillance.' Researchers at Stanford are now crowdsourcing data to incontrovertibly establish just how much the NSA knows. 'Phone metadata is inherently revealing,' says a study author. 'We want to rigorously prove it—for the public, for Congress, and for the courts.' If you have an Android phone and a Facebook account, you can grab the MetaPhone app on Google Play."

Comments

Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere

[turp182]

This post titled Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere is very insightful (and very basic in terms of collected data compared to phone metadata):

http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/

There's a previous and more mathematically detailed analysis of the same data here (the author above didn't know about this analysis until after publishing, but the link above is a much easier read):
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/chwe/ps269/han.pdf

Stanford Researcher - Glad to Answer Questions

[jonathanmayer]

Hi all,

I'm one of the Stanford researchers working on the MetaPhone project. Way cool that we made /.!

Some additional details are available at metaphone.me. I would be glad to answer questions.

Best,
Jonathan