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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."

11 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 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.

    3. 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

    4. 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."
  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 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.

  6. 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.