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

If you were paranoid about the NSA having it

[hsmith]

Why would you give it out to anyone else?

I understand their point, but uh no.

Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it

[PeeAitchPee]

Because we (used to) have a reasonable expectation that private conversations would remain private, and in the 21st Century, things like phone calls are needed to, well, live. There's no fucking reason the NSA needs metadata about my call to Grandma. It's private and I don't want them to have it. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. And decades of horrible precedent have distorted the meaning of "legal" so that the 4th Amendment is able to be ignored by anyone in gov't who wishes to do so. It's time to start over.

Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it

[bob_super]

If it's officially not private, then they should just ask the NSA for an anonymized data dump. We paid them for the collection already.

Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it

[Loki_1929]

That won't do it. What you need to do is put some teeth in the Constitution. Simply define any violation of the Constitution by an agent or employee of the government as treason and put every non-unanimous SCOTUS decision to a popular vote. If 4/5 of voters agree that one side or the other obviously violated the Constitution with their opinion (be it the winning or losing side), they also go on trial for treason.

Kiss that rubber stamp from the courts goodbye. No more Citizens United or Kelo decisions. And good luck getting any sizable number of people on board with blatantly illegal activities that violate the Constitution when everyone who participates in any way in anything questionable is risking their lives. Today, anyone can willfully disregard the highest law of the land with no consequence. The higher up they are, the larger and more grand their golden parachute is should they ever be required to take a dive for the folks upstairs. Watch in utter amazement how few government lawyers will jump to write position papers defending secret surveillance, detainment, and torture of US citizens when doing so is automatic treason.

And who handles the prosecution and holds the trial? A semi-random group of citizens selected automatically for the task. No more inside group who would never go after one another. No more buddy-buddy side deals that make everything go away because they're from the right family or have the right connections. Just regular people applying common sense and decency to keep everyone in government in line. You walk the straight and narrow or the citizens come calling.

Anything less, you can forget it working. These idiots responded to "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" by banning guns and they responded to "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" by launching secret surveillance programs to watch us every minute of every day to the greatest extend currently possible.

If you think this is all coming from a lack of clarity, then you haven't been paying attention. It's coming from a lack of consequences.

Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it

[icebike]

I've been called a nut job here on /. and elsewhere for suggesting that the biggest flaw the founding fathers made was
forgetting the teeth in the Constitution. Glad I'm not the only one waking up to the realization that this is a serious
failure. They simply didn't consider that courts would be as corruptible as the rest of government.

Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it

[Runaway1956]

I've heard more and more people calling for a constitutional convention. Guess what would happen, if one were convened, today?

RIAA, MPAA, and a multitude of "representatives" from the military industrial complex would rewrite the constitution for us. Right now those same players are writing some abomination that they refer to as the "Trans-Pacific Partnership". Of course, that "partnership" fails to invite common citizens into the discussions.

Think about what you're asking.

Misunderstanding the argument

[jfengel]

The claim isn't that metadata isn't revealing. Of course it's revealing. That's why they're gathering it.

The assertion is that metadata isn't private in the same sense that the name and address on an envelope aren't private. If you leave one out on the table, anybody can read it. They can't read what's inside the envelope without opening it, but the addressee and return address are plain as day.

Whether that argument holds legal water is up to lawyers, legislators, judges, and (ultimately) voters. But nobody needs to convince the NSA that it's revealing; they're well aware of it. And so, I assume, is everybody reading this site. What the Congress and the Courts know... honestly, I wouldn't even begin to imagine, but I suspect that they're unlikely to change their mind on it based on this. I can't imagine that "install this data-gathering app and we'll show you that we can gather a lot of data" comes as a surprise to anybody.

Re:Misunderstanding the argument

[turp182]

If it isn't considered private, it should all be released to the public, maybe with a month delay to account for national security needs.

They claim the data isn't blanket searched. First of all, I don't have trust in the messenger at this point. Second, the systems they have are considerably more powerful/expansive than I had imagined. By the looks of it, it's a global communication catcher with no reasonable limits (whatever that would mean).

Third, in August they admitted to "2,776 incidents of 'unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications" in the preceding twelve months' ":
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/08/nsa-violated-privacy-law-thousands-of-times.html

Seems public enough to me to truly be public.

What we really need

[nytes]

What we really need is for someone to get a hold of some pro-dragnet surveillance politico's, like Diane Feinstein's, metadata and publish a nice analysis of that.

Then she could get up there and tell us how innocent the collection is.

Re:So let me get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are releasing an ANDROID app that allows me to volunteer to send you all my metadata? Um, not just no. Heck NO!

It's bad enough that the NSA gets it from my carrier and that Google gets loads of data from me every time I use the search feature on my phone, but even to make a point I'm NOT going to sign up and let some yahoos (um.. classical usage, not the company) track everything they want about my handset.

Yeah, you're right. Somehow a very public project like this in your mind is far worse than the "yahoos" at Facebook, Google, Twitter, and (ironically) Yahoo gathering your data and selling it to multiple bidders instead.

Feel better now, or is that cloud of ignorance still choking you out?

Here, let me put this a bit more bluntly. You own a smartphone on a US carrier. Your privacy is already fucked, and you agreed to it in the EULA. Wake the fuck up already.

Re:Stanford Researcher - Glad to Answer Questions

[Charliemopps]

Your app requires a Facebook account. Please change that. Nearly everyone that has an android phone also has a Google account. Please make that an option.