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

Posted by Soulskill on from the give-up-your-privacy-to-fight-for-your-privacy dept.

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."

21 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Nice try, NSA

  2. If you were paranoid about the NSA having it by hsmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why would you give it out to anyone else?

    I understand their point, but uh no.

    1. Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it by PeeAitchPee · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it by turp182 · · Score: 2

      Because the Stanford project doesn't have a list of suspected/confirmed terrorist/criminals it may be try to associate you with. Unless they are asking such a question (Are you a criminal?), which would be awesome.

      And you are correct, No...

      --
      BlameBillCosby.com
    3. Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it by bob_super · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re: If you were paranoid about the NSA having it by alen · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hi, I work for the NSA
      I just checked and I know for a fact that you rarely call your grandma. In fact I see she calls you and you don't pick up

      I sent a note to your local police department to harass you until you call her. And I set your phone on autodial her number to help you out

    5. Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      I don't think it's necessary to start over, as The Constitution does provide a great framework.

      Perhaps what is needed is an Article V Convention to iron out a few of the problems. An amendment to entirely disband the NSA and prohibit the creation of any agency with a similar purpose might be a good start. Follow up with an amendment to absolutely prohibit all trade with any country having a local equivalent to the NSA.

      Don't be fooled, it won't be the end of spying. The roaches exposed with these amendments will simply flee to darker shadows and try to keep it even more secret. That's just part of fighting the good fight.

    6. Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it by Loki_1929 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      -- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
    7. Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it by icebike · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    8. Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it by Runaway1956 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    9. Re:If you were paranoid about the NSA having it by kermidge · · Score: 2

      Well, that, and, cynical about their fellow men as they were, they couldn't conceive that the citizenry would be so lax in their duties as to let things get so far out of whack. The "common man", as stupid (that's asleep, in old speak; oblivious in the new), parochial, and lazy outside their own very narrow immediate situation, still had some balls back then. Even, on rare occasions, some sense of duty towards the commonweal. Nowadays? Pfui.

      As pointed out below, treason doesn't cover it. But things such as mis- and mal-feasance likely do, along with abuse of office, acting under color of authority, misappropriation of funds, etc. Set an ethical prosecutor loose and keep him, and the rest, accountable to that committee drawn from the public, as is done for jury duty. I expect we might want to avoid the guillotine or noose, though. Certainly the punishments should be strict enough pour encourager les autres; and, rather than country-club prisons, put 'em to work cleaning up roadsides and such - get some useful work out of the bastards.

      Yeah, the world being as it is, we need some good intel on capabilities and intents, as always, human nature and nasty folks being what what they are, but even human nature can be worked on, and we have (or ought) police detectives for the bad actors (and on that note, abolish stings and entrapments.) What we don't need is 1984 on steroids.

  3. Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere by turp182 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    --
    BlameBillCosby.com
  4. Stanford Researcher - Glad to Answer Questions by jonathanmayer · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    1. Re:Stanford Researcher - Glad to Answer Questions by jonathanmayer · · Score: 2, Informative

      We aren't dastardly plotting a secret scheme to bootstrap a startup. This is an academic research project.

      As for the data, we recognize that participants are placing their trust in us. We have committed to securing the data and deleting it once the study is complete.

    2. Re:Stanford Researcher - Glad to Answer Questions by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  5. Misunderstanding the argument by jfengel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Misunderstanding the argument by turp182 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      BlameBillCosby.com
    2. Re:Misunderstanding the argument by Immerman · · Score: 2

      Care to bet on that? These days I wouldn't. Consider - most mail routing is done by automated systems, how difficult do you suppose it would be to send/store a copy of the plain text sender/receiver information while the routing barcode is being printed?

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    3. Re:Misunderstanding the argument by kermidge · · Score: 2

      All envelopes have been photographed by the USPS for some time now - and that data is available via existing legal means and conditions. Whether there is wider collection I don't know.

      A search brings this up as one of the early results:

      http://news.yahoo.com/ap-interview-usps-takes-photos-mail-072949079.html

      and according to the article the data is kept for up to a month "but they are available for law enforcement, if requested." The program started after the ricin attacks in 2001. Also according to the article, each sorting machine keeps its own stuff - their is no central store.

  6. What is metadata? by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 2

    Well, it's GIS map info, the Google app tracking of your searches, the cell phone tracking devices in all US cities that geolocate you downtown, the traffic camera feeds with license plate matches, the credit or debit card transactions at every store, the answers you gave to what you thought was a cute girl online but was actually a fake harvesting bot.

    All of that plus your digitized walking stride, your clothing selections, and everyone you talked to and were within 3 feet of.

    Congratulations!

    You live in a Police State that makes the Stasi look like pikers ...

    --
    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  7. What we really need by nytes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    -- I have monkeys in my pants.