(RT) In defending the NSA's surveillance policies, many have cited the agency's claim that it merely collects phone numbers dialed, lengths of calls, and other metadata. Yet researchers now say the NSA can identify individuals in that vast collection of data.
Scholars at Stanford University in California set out to determine how, if at all, the NSA's metadata collection impacts the individual Americans whose information is swept up. The indiscriminate collection of phone records is one of the NSA's primary surveillance programs, and one of the first revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. US President Obama sat down with Charlie Rose of PBS in June to defend the government's position.
“Program number one is called the 2015 program. What that does is it gets data from the service providers – like a Verizon – in bulk,” Obama said. “And basically you have call pairs. You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number. There are no names, there's no content in that database. All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how long they took place. So that database is sitting there.”
That might be true, technically. But Stanford researchers Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler found that the agency does not need to collect names to identify an individual.
The pair built an app - known as MetaPhone - which Android users could volunteer to sign up for, in order to give the researchers access to their metadata. They assumed it would be simple to find users based on their metadata and, as it were, it took just hours.
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