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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."

5 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.