What exactly the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) can learn from the data it gathers from telecommunications companies is being investigated by scientists at Stanford University, creating their own database with such data.
As mentioned in a MIT Technology Review article, the Metaphone program asks volunteers who participate to install on their phone an Android app that sends researchers copies of call logs and basic data from the phone owner's Facebook account.
According to researchers, a large collection of such data will enable the use of data mining techniques to determine which areas of citizens' lives are actually exposed by their calls and messages.
The data (metadata) in question, which, according to the revelations of Edward Snowden, was collected by the NSA from companies such as Verizon, provides information about the duration, the time, and the callers/recipients of calls and messages. The agency claims that the metadata is examined only for specific phone numbers that are related to ongoing investigations, however, according to its critics, such a database could be used to disclose personal data of citizens on a very large scale.
Currently the NSA's data analysis capabilities are unknown – however, Jonathan Meyer, co‑founder of the MetaPhone program, believes that a crowdsourced collection of such data will help in understanding them. «Some proponents of the NSA programs claim that metadata does not reveal anything. We want to provide empirical evidence on the subject».
Source: naftemporiki.gr
