NSA Security Claims Disproved

Claims by the American spooks that they are not able to find out much about people from the data they collect have been blown apart. The NSA and some lawmakers used to assert that information it was collecting, like phone numbers and length of calls, couldn’t be tied to the callers’ names. But an investigation by people who have been collecting data voluntarily from Android users proved that it was easy to correlate numbers to names.

The recent program named Metaphone collected information from volunteers with Android phones. They gathered such data as recent calls, texts and social network information. The goal was to find out how metadata can be connected with surveillance. So, the researchers selected 5,000 numbers from their pool to find out whether they could manage to connect any of them to people names through freely available online tools.

The researchers discovered real names for 27% of the numbers using only Google, Yelp, Facebook and Google Places. They wondered what would happen if the spies expended a bit of brainpower on such a project. The researchers randomly sampled 100 numbers from their dataset, Googled each and in under an hour managed to associate a person or a business with 60% of numbers. When they added in their 3 initial sources, they were up to 73%. Moreover, if the spies wanted to invest some money into the project, they could get the figures up to 90% without much effort.

The researchers issued an update to the Metaphone application which enabled instant feedback for users, providing them with a quick view of how closely they were connected to other app users and how many businesses they have been in contact with. Anyway, it makes the NSA protests about spying look sick.