Grad Student Proves NSA Can Link Metadata To Your Identity With ‘Marginal Effort’

[Purveyor]

A Stanford graduate student has shown just how easily names can be matched with phone records, contradicting some of the legal justification offered by federal authorities for the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone data.

President Barack Obama said in June that the surveillance captured only which telephone numbers were connected to others. “There are no names … in that database,” Obama said.

Just last week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said cell phone customers had no reasonable expectation to privacy because the data collected by the NSA because it did not contain their names.

But researcher Jonathan Mayer and co-author Patrick Mutchler reported that they’d gathered thousands of phone numbers from volunteers and checked various public online directories to link some of the 5,000 numbers chosen at random from their database to individuals.

With “marginal effort,” they matched more than 27 percent of the numbers using just Yelp, Google Places and Facebook.

MORE...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/26/grad-student-proves-nsa-can-link-metadata-to-your-identity-with-marginal-effort/

[Pholus]

1. That was ALWAYS the lamest excuse they offered up.

There was no doubt that anyone WITHOUT A CLEARANCE can get this information from google, what magical barrier prevents the pros from doing it.

That was the beginning of realizing these guys had to be doing something quite unwholesome if this was their excuse...

[Thinkingabout]

2. I would expect a grad student to be able to read the statement and conclude the phone call

Records collected from phone providers does not contain the names. Most anyone who spends a small amount of time on the internet knows you can search for records by name or number. If those who wants to take this privacy issue further needs to jump onto the searchable databases for failure to maintain their privacy. Let me explain the phone call record data base again to those who do grasp the full base of the data base given from the phone companies to the NSA, the data base does not have the names associated with the phone call records.