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Stanford Researchers Spot Medical Conditions, Guns, and More In Phone Metadata
An anonymous reader writes "Since the NSA's phone metadata program broke last summer, politicians have trivialized the privacy implications. It's 'just metadata,' Dianne Feinstein and others have repeatedly emphasized. That view is no longer tenable: Stanford researchers crowdsourced phone metadata from real users, and easily identified calls to 'Alcoholics Anonymous, gun stores, NARAL Pro-Choice, labor unions, divorce lawyers, sexually transmitted disease clinics, a Canadian import pharmacy, strip clubs, and much more.' Looking at patterns in call metadata, they correctly diagnosed a cardiac condition and outed an assault rifle owner. 'Reasonable minds can disagree about the policy and legal constraints,' the authors conclude. 'The science, however, is clear: phone metadata is highly sensitive.'"
"Reasonable minds can disagree about the policy and legal constraints"
Not really. They're infringing upon the constitution and privacy rights. A reasonable mind would always view this as a bad thing.
"Outed" an assault rifle owner? I wasn't aware guns had been banned in the United States. Stop trying to act like perfectly legal actions are illegal to further your already-weak agenda.
Who you are, who you're talking to, where you are, where they are and how fast you're moving if you're changing cells.
davecb@spamcop.net
Think of all the harm secrecy has done throughout history. Although I as well as almost everyone else sort of hate being spied upon there really is a vast upside to knowing what people are up to. My real concern is that some groups and classes have more privilege to spy than does the man on the street. That can get dangerous in a hurry. At the vey least we should have the same privileges as any corporation and maybe the citizen should have the same ability as government to spy back at government. I expect my military to have sufficient power to never have to be concerned about what knowledge an enemy gains. I feel that our military should be like Babe Ruth pointing at the fence showing where the home run would be hit before the pitch is thrown. Are our weapons so inadequate that other nations could build them even if we handed them the blue prints and specs? Are we so weak that we must be concerned with spy vs. spy activities?
Of course it's sensitive and provides "useful" information. If it didn't provide any information, they wouldn't bother collecting it.
Stazi. NSA. CIA. CSEC. GCHQ.
All the same animal, just different flags.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Dianne Feinstein is the same senator who complained that the CIA searched congress's computers.
It was obvious before that it was a violation of privacy, this is just an illustration. Do you think politicians will care if it doesn't have anything to do with them?
No beer and no TV make Homer something something
hello, can i have your name please?
not on the phone
ok i have your # do you need an appt.?
yes
what's the problem?
can't say it on the phone..
silly puddy again ok...... shall we bill your 'insurance'?
yes if you can find it, all i have is threats of being untreated..
ok we'll see you on....???
that would be fine
don't forget to bring a stool sample..
arrggghhh
I thought that was an obama joke.
The term assault rifle (illegal to own) isn't mentioned anywhere.
The weapon was an AR (most likely legal).
I read somewhere that new articles are red until they get comments, but this doesn't seem 100% consistent in my experience.
google , microsoft, att, verison
Is that the metadata has no names or content. Who is contacting all these people? By looking at area codes and googling phone numbers you could determine a city, but that's about it. Why are they contacting these people? Do they contact an abortion clinic because they or someone close to them want an abortion? Perhaps they are anti-abortion. Maybe they are part of the press. Or they could be informed citizens trying to gain more information.
Metadata analysis is an art, not a science.
Of course, I am still not for metadata collection...I'm just saying that fears of metadata abuse are overexaggerated.
Subscribers get to see an article in red before it posts. Sometimes regular users do too, right before it posts.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Wasn't she the Queen Bitch that was complaining about CIA spying on her computers? Wow, talk about hypocritical. Guess when it happens to you, it isn't so trivial anymore.
Wow, someone hand me a PhD in metadata!
<sarcasm>Wait, I thought that Roe v. Wade established my right to privacy. Don't those left-wing nutjobs believe in their own judicial activisim? Based on that legal precedent, all NSA spying of all U.S. citizens should cease, immediately!</sarcasm>
laughing http://cdn.rt.com/files/news/23/87/20/00/nsa.si.jpg away the stench of WMD on credit crown royal zionist nazi media generated glowbull fearmongering http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=public%20relations%20hired%20goons&sm=3 just like old berlin
Yes it was me they outed. If they want to see my gun, come to my house and I'll show it to you one round at a time. You may have to look quickly because many rounds will pass by your head quickly but at least a few will be stopped by you so you can have a closer look.
I guess now we need "Tor for phone calls". Then again, the person calling the strip club may have even been a salesperson calling to see if they needed to buy more booze. The metadata can give you patterns that may be suggestive - but they don't necessarily prove any certain use case.
Actually, it wasn't Roe v. Wade.. it was Griswold v. Connecticut, and had to do with the availability of contraception. Essentially saying that what you do in the privacy of your home is none of the government's business. Importantly, there's no explicit "right to privacy" in the US Constitution, but Griswold laid the foundation for why it follows from many of the other parts.
Roe did cite Griswold and other cases and essentially held that decisions to have abortions are a *private matter* between woman and doctor
Was it black? Omg so glad they successfuly found a hunting rifle painted black...
Seems the title of a pro 4th amendment slashdot post skipped right over the 2nd in his disdain of totalitarianism
No way dude, the booze salesman always stops by the strip club in person.
Subscribers get to see an article in red before it posts. Sometimes regular users do too, right before it posts.
In other words: Users tend to see an article before it is posted. Ahem.
It must be the logic of the third Millennium that escapes my ancient brain.
Yeah, but 'suggestive' is all that is needed to potentially make someone's life difficult. As a society we put a lot of emotional stock in 'red flags' that indicate someone is a threat, and are quick to take very limited information and combine it with some authority or socially reenforced magic 8 ball and conclude that 'something is wrong there'.
If it is just metadata why doesnt Dianne Feinstein and the Parrots publish their own to their constituents and the public? After all they dont have anything to hide, correct?
What the hell does "outed an assault rifle owner" mean? Last I checked, assault rifles are perfectly legal so what would be the point of outing an owner?
Oh that's right....I forgot: sensationalism.
Did they use Caller ID or look up the numbers themselves ?
... then Ms. Feinstein should have no problem with a FOIA request for the metadata for her cellphone.
I bet it would take about an hour to find a call from a lobbyist, received during a break in a legislative session.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
No, "assault rifles" are not perfectly legal, unless you have an FFL and pay the annual fee. .
Bzzzzzt. Wrong. They are perfectly legal and you have no idea what you are talking about. I have many and I don't pay a fee or have an FFL.
The only rifles that are restricted to own are automatic rifles. ie: machine guns. But those have been restricted for a long time. Outside of that, there are no other restrictions to buy, own, posses, shoot, or sell an "assault" rifle/weapon (no difference). That law expired and good riddance.
The reason is was a stupid law is simple: the only thing that makes a rifle an "assault" rifle instead of a regular rifle is aesthetic characteristics like a bayonet holder, hand carrier, short barrel, etc. Basically: all the shit that doesn't matter for a gun. Outside of that criteria, they all work the same. The have long barrels. They fire bullets of many calibers. They are semi-automatic. They have scopes. Etc, etc, etc.
Does the NSA rearrange bits on cable-connected computers in the USA without a warrant?
Please pardon the John McEnroe reference!
A few years ago Yahoo released some cleansed search data. Researchers were able to pinpoint the searches of a specific guy living in Florida.
For instance, for no good reason, stories I send to myself via the "share" button on a lot of sites have an overly descriptive "header" in them that basically reveals the entire content and tone and POV of the article. It's more descriptive than even the headline. I am not comfortable with this. so I take the time to change the header to something like "read later".
Once companies get keyed into the "public nature" of metadata, - if they aren't already - believe that they will generate the most revealing metadata they possibly can for whoever pays them to do so.
Metadata is often talked about as though it were all just naturally occurring phenomena , like the particular mineral content of water in your area and we're all standing around going "golly, look at what can be teased out of this here bit of nature " when in fact it's a human controlled creation which can be engineered just as humans see fit.
You have given the most amazing logical argument in favor of gun ownership I think I have ever heard. I have never thought about it this way, but it makes perfect sense.
I've attentively followed every stray tidbit to cross my radar about the shadow sector since the publication of The Puzzle Palace, about the peripheral ghosts of which my algebra professor had direct experience.
The gold box agencies can do traffic analysis at scale. They can model metadata at scale. They can't break every damn cipher at scale—neither can they employ the rubber hose password-getter at large scale (the Soviets managed to cover about 10% of their population with blue welts over a thirty year period, but ultimately this did no favours to their economy).
The best approach to scaling crackers is to leak key bits in the purportedly pseudo-random number nonce stream. This is the hardest tampering to identify from the outside of a black box. Even when the black box is reverse engineered and one discovers that random is far from uniformly random (with no stray key-space correlates), some idiot applies Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
How about we agree to make a small exception for the industrial-scale tainting of purportedly random numbers, where discerning the difference between malice and stupidity achieves an elite level of algebraic epsilon? Oh, look, one digit in the source code for the random number generator has a wrong digit. Must have been a careless mistake—as if careless mistakes are a dime a dozen in the land where a poor man's nonce is a persistent agency's key-space collapsing back-channel.
The NSA does not randomly shoot holes in the protection of the American public. Worse than having no back door is having a back-door that somehow becomes shared with the wrong people. What they want is to inject a weakness that only they can exploit, even when their adversaries discover their handiwork.
Just off the top of my head, one way to achieve this is to require that exploiting the leak requires having the intercept history of the channel in hand since day one. The unfortunate flip side is that the specificity of these methods of single-party Achilles-heal exploitation becomes a smoking gun to the presence of a far-from-blind watch master. No ruse is totally perfect.
But you can always keep 90% of the population busy debating whether metadata has any value, such that any debate that makes any progress at all contains only those people who were already sophisticated cranks (recruitment/rubber-hose scale, to mention the carrot and stick). It all works out.
If scale matters, assigning a scant value to metadata can not be so much as trivially entertained by a thinking person. Pity we have so few.
s/heal/heel
Second time this morning. Bad fingers, bad.
We do, IMO, need to mandate some changes, like speech code training for anybody before allowing him/her to speak. You know, yelling "FIRE!" in a theater could get people killed. Rather than punishing a person after he does it and kills people, we should be progressive and put gags on everybody. Then, if somebody wants to exercise "free speech" (something we KNOW our founders really only intended for politicians) he must pass a background check (to be sure he's never used his speech to harm others in the past) a mental health check (to make sure he won't go crazy and yell fire in the future) and prove he NEEDS to speak (like people in NYC must prove they NEED guns before getting permits - proof that generally comes in the form of campaign contributions)
We do, IMO, need to mandate some changes, like knife safety training before allowing anybody to have a knife. You know, some crazy Muslim terrorists just knifed about 30 people to death in China recently and this could have been prevented if nobody could have a knife without proper training and approval. Certainly, there should be a limit to how many slots you can have in a knife rack...there's just no reasonable need for a knife rack with more than two slots. We must stop the evil knife-making companies from flooding our cities with such a huge variety of inexpensive "assault knives".
We do, IMO, need to mandate some changes, like requiring internal "travel papers" to keep terrorists, arsonists, rapists, drug runners, etc from moving themselves and their stuff so easily around the nation. Every citizen should have a GPS tracking device attached at birth and not be allowed to be anywhere other than home without first applying for travel papers and passing a background check and proving that they have a NEED that outweighs any potential hazard to society...
This is, of course, all pure unadulturated crap
"WE" either live in a free Constitutional republic or we do not. If we do, then "WE" respect people's rights and do not infringe on them until they abuse those rights. It's far too tempting and too simple to heed the call that "WE" (who think in any particular way) must band together "for the greater good" to suppress or even remove rights from "they" or "them" (people who think differently) with complete disregard for the rules (the Constitution). We either believe in "innocent until proven guilty" or we do not... and presuming somebody will do bad things (and therefore taking stuff away from him that he has a constitutional right to have) is EXACTLY the same thing as presuming him guilty (in this case of wanting or planning to do something bad). The Supreme Court has essentially already warned about this re "free speech" when it refuse to allow Nixon to block publication of "The Pentagon Papers" (google "prior restraint" and "Daniel Ellsberg") in-effect telling Nixon "you cannot block somebody's speech rights before he uses them, based on the idea he might misuse them".
For those who are terrified of guns and want to know how we could be safe without tons of "gun control" laws, the past is prologue. Before all the gun laws, people in the US could own and carry what they wanted and it took a real moron to start something with a gun (because he could never know how many of the people around him had better guns and were better shots). The crazy wild salloon shootouts of "western" movies are just that - as historically phony as an Esther Williams aquatic musical in technicolor. Before the "Chicago Massacre" (in which a handful of gangsters killed several other gangsters with Tommy guns during prohibition) Any American could own a fully-automatic machine gun - yet there were NO school shootings with these guns. Government banned machine guns "to make us safer" and now a typical weekend in Chicago is worse than the "massacre" that lead to the ban. The simple fact is that there are some people who will use ANY tradgedy to advance the cause of controlling and limiting other people, and far too many people are
Our Supreme Court made a supreme error long ago when it permitted warantless access to phone records on the grounds that by allowing a third party (the phone company) to make such records in the first place (a requirement of the phone system) the user of the phone systems was consenting to third-party access to such records. But, of course, there's no real difference between this third-party rule for phones and a similar rule for credit card purchases, or nearly ANY other transaction which involves a "third party". This is now intentionally misconstrued by government-types who mislead the public with the argument "it's only METADATA" (they count on the average non-geek to not know what that means and its implications); the average citizen thinks "well, if it's only gobbledygook and not real information, it must be OK..."
Consider:
It's the 1700's and George Washington is meeting in various small pubs in the colonies to coordinate his activities with his spies and his officers and representatives of the colonial congress... and, secretly and without warrants... the British are going to all the pubs collecting all the bar tab records, all the records of who stayed in the spare bedrooms, who rented any private meeting rooms, whose horses were fed, groomed, re-shoe'd (and which blacksmiths were involved) who supplied the pubs, etc and when each of these things happened. And imagine they similarly collected other "metedata" from all the other colonial activities. And imaging they analyzed it together with their own metadata on who supplied the British soldiers and fleet, who in the colonies were in all the supply chains for wood, metalwork, food, alcohol, tea, etc. It's all METADATA.... there's not a British soldier in each pub spying. They would, of course, have been able to figure out nearly all the details of the rebellion, Washington's spies, etc and the American founding Fathers would have been rounded-up and hanged for treason against the King and the U.S. would never have existed. Does ANYBODY think our founders would have thought that this idea of gathering "metadata" on everybody without any warrants was either harmless or acceptable?
Anybody with ANY "inner-geek" knows how bad gathering "metadata" and analyzing it can be - and that it can be even more revealing than what one might learn from gathering information that generally requires a warrant. If you are somebody who "gets it", then you owe it to yourself, your kids, and the generations that follow to educate your friends, relatives, co-workers, and even any political allies (in ANY party) who have fallen into the trap Franklin warned about - trading a little freedom now for promised security (and in the end losing BOTH)
Analysis of metadata is traffic analysis. It has always been one of the staples of military intelligence, and everyone involved in intelligence-gathering knows it. It's based on the knowledge that a great deal of information--often including identities--can be gleaned simply from patterns of communication. Anyone in the intelligence world who says otherwise is knowingly lying.
Ok, so the OP should have stated Class 3 firearms instead of "assault weapons". Had he said that I would not have replied. Vocabulary matters. Class 3 is not the same thing as an "assault weapon/rifle".
Instead, he said we had to have an FFL and pay annual fee to own an assault rifle. That simply isn't true.....unless the assault rifle is a Class 3 weapon. However, most assault rifles are not Class 3 weapons so OPs statement is demonstrably false.
Im sure that using 'assumptions' in the same way of the same metadata that every one of these researchers when their data was analyzed would show 'evidence' of them 'statistically' being pedophiles. As usual with this kind of 'machine intelligence' application it is not the mechanism, but the functions that classify and judge the data which is the monumentally hard thing to get right.
I think without all of the work involved in this study, the credit card statement analogy paints a picture everyone can understand easily and accurately.
Subscribers get to see an article in red before it posts. Sometimes regular users do too, right before it posts.
Go figure, /. is using time travel for posts... but that doesn't make sense as there are way too many spelling mistakes.
Christ, can any of you people go read up on the subscriber benefits without having someone to hold your hand and explain it to you?
'The science, however, is clear: phone metadata is highly sensitive.'
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I don't mean to sound judgmental, but for some reason people think firearms are inherently dangerous. Modern firearms are safe to store; there is no real safety risk of owning one as long as you are responsible about it... You can choose whatever you want to do, but a good comparison is a parked car. (99% of the time) you need a person behind the wheel, acting dangerously beyond their normal judgment for someone to get hurt.
For people who don't want to buy a gunsafe and other necessary things, I completely understand why it might not be the best choice. Just because a few people do stupid things doesn't mean all of the safe people should be forced to suffer.
Good, if anyone has the power to stop this, it's the NRA.
I would agree with you if....average Muslims made unequivocal objections to radical Muslims and Muslim terrorists.
Ostensibly, average Muslims don't seem to voice concerns about unreasonable Muslims