It’s only phone metadata

Good day all, Angry Webmaster here with a little piece on why the telephone metadata matters. I was watching Greg Gutfeld on Fox’s “The Five” when he said that it was only numbers. Now I don’t watch The Five very often so I don’t know if Gutfeld was just making noise or if he actually means this.

I will try to explain why cellphone metadata is very important and why it should matter to you. The first thing to ask is, just what is this metadata stuff? This is the information that the phone company gathers to determine your bill and what the loads are on their network. You see part of this when you get your bill each month. It lists all the calls you made and received, the number at the other end and where the calls were made to and came from.

This is a small part of what is gathered. On the back end, the phone company also can tell where you are, where you have been and with a little “massaging” how long it took you to get from one point to another. They can do this by using the cell towers as radio direction finders.

This works due to the very nature of cellphone operations. As you travel along, your phone is “pinging” the cell towers in the area trying to find the one with the fewest users that is closest to you. As you move along, the phone will automatically switch from one tower to the next. Using this information, you can tell quite a lot.

For instance, they can tell that you are traveling along the highway and get a rough idea of your speed. They can also tell where you are, usually withing a few hundred feet, and where you came from. With enough of this data, they can determine your travel habits for quite some time. This isn’t as accurate as GPS, but it is “Good enough for government work.”

Then there are the actual calls you make. Now the government isn’t allowed to listen in on the call without a warrant, however, they can find out who you called and how long you talked with the other person. With enough data, they can tell how often you talked to that person and for how long. Then they can do a search of publicly available records to find out where that person went to school, where they work, their age, sex and a host of other things.

Then there are texts and email. Now, they can’t legally read the contents without a warrant, at least that was what everyone thought. According to How Stuff Works, until recently, the government was reading people’s email without a warrant. Here are the details.

It turns out that the U.S. government has been using the Stored Communications Act (SCA) ((Stored Communications Act)) to read private e-mails without a search warrant. These are e-mails stored on services like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. If the government wants to read e-mails that on their way to a recipient, they need to have a special type of search warrant, a wiretap order. Wiretap warrants can be difficult to get. So instead of worrying about in-transit e-mails, the government secretly accessed stored e-mails, justifying its conduct under the SCA. Increasingly large amounts of storage space mean that many people never delete e-mails (this writer does so only rarely). So a person’s entire history of electronic communication could be available to the government without a judge first signing off on a warrant.

I bet THAT got your attention! Most people don’t delete their email from places like Gmail, Yahoo, etc since they have so much storage space available. Most people also don’t use encryption software ((Email encryption)) such as PGP ((Pretty Good Privacy)) to protect their email either. Generally, people thought that if the Government wanted to access their email, they would have to serve a warrant. In other words, they thought the Fourth Amendment protected them. That turned out not to be the case, and it hot a few people very concerned.

The issue worried civil liberties and Internet rights advocates, and a recent court ruling was in their favor. On Monday, June 18, a panel of three judges from the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals declared the government’s actions and the SCA unconstitutional. The result is that stored e-mails are now more secure from government eavesdropping, since the government now has to get a warrant to read the stored e-mails of someone they’re investigating.

I haven’t followed that case at all, but you can bet the Government is going to run this up to the Supreme Court. However, with metadata, they really don’t need to get into your email. They can look at the data and see who it was sent to, and how large it was and whether or not there was a file attached to it. I’m not sure, but they might be able to determine what type of file you sent to the other person or persons. (Picture, Word file, pdf file, etc)

So, right now, the government can see where you are, who you might be talking to, and if you sent them a message with a file attached. Are you beginning to get the picture? Well, here’s a bit more for you to think about. Web surfing.

With the advent of the Smartphone, people could hook into the phone company and surf the web. Every smartphone has some sort of data plan. Even I have one, although I tend to use a WiFi connection as often as I can. Now, in general, the Government doesn’t monitor web browsing. Considering the huge number of web sites and the traffic, it would be a logistical nightmare. HOWEVER, (You knew that was coming didn’t you), if they have been attracted to you, they can do a few things with the phone company to see where you are going and what you are looking at on the Web.

We have companies like Google and DoubleClick that have to do some sort of tracking in order to sell advertising. The difference between Google and the government is that Google isn’t interested in YOU specifically, at least from a law enforcement perspective. They just want to sell you things. However, they can easily shut down the systems they use to sort of protect your privacy and when given a court order, will do so. (They are in court over this and other issues right now)

So, lets do a hypothetical exercise. Let’s take John Smith. He has an Iphone and uses it constantly. Now let me introduce you to Agent Smedlap. He’s running various filter programs on all the metadata they have from John’s phone company looking for patterns. He might even have a phone number from Abdul the Terrorist that he’s tracking.

Now Abdul makes a call to Achmed to plan their next suicide bombing. However, Abdul fat fingers the number and accidentally dials John. John misses the call and it goes to voice mail. When Abdul hears the voicemail message, he realizes he dialed a wrong number and hangs up. However, Agent Smedlap’s filter program catches that call and notifies Smedlap. He looks at it and starts looking at the metadata for John’s phone. Here’s what he could find.

John travels a lot and is constantly texting and emailing as well as talking. Agent Smedlap uses the metadata to see where John might have gone. He notices that John spent some time near a power station and that he also took some pictures. According to the metadata, John didn’t email the pictures so Agent Smedlap looks at John’s data usage. He sees that there was a lot of usage on the day John was near the powerplant, and that it could be that John uploaded the picture to Dropbox or Facebook.

Agent Smedlap has Contractor Jones start doing a web search for John Smith. Contractor Jones hits all the social sites and finds John’s Facebook page. John screwed up the privacy settings so Contractor Jones is able to see what John has to say.

He sees that John is married, works for XYZ corporation and isn’t to thrilled with the United States being in Iraq. Contractor Jones writes up a short report for Agent Smedlap. Smedlap reads the report and starts “Deep Diving” all of Johns metadata for the last year. He sees that John has been talking to a woman a lot and she isn’t his wife.

Agent Smedlap find out her name and sends that over to Contractor Jones. Jones runs the same basic check and finds out that the woman in question, her name is Amy, is very big in the Green Movement among other things. He does another search on John and finds that he isn’t all that interested in the Green movement. Contractor Jones finds a picture of Amy in a bikini. He puts two and two together and hands it all back to Agent Smedlap with his conclusions.

Smedlap starts checking all of Amy’s metadata and sees she spends a lot of time protesting at the power station. He then runs a compare and finds that both she and John like to visit a place called the “No Tell Motel.” Agent Smedlap does a little more research into John and finds that XYZ corporation does a lot of work with the company that owns the power station.

Agent Smedlap takes all this to his supervisor. They go over it and come to the conclusion that Jones is having an affair with Amy, Amy’s group has known financial connections from Abdul’s rich Uncle Omar. John appears to have access to detailed information on that powerplant. They decide that the call from Abdul was some sort of signal and start a full scale investigation of John. They get search warrants, writs, subpenas and start digging into John. They find charges from the No Tell motel. They determine this is where they are meeting to pass information. They start following John, and when he next meets Amy, the Government SWAT team crashes the door.

Of course, the only thing Amy and John are passing is bodily fluids. John is cuffed and dragged off to the local jail for several weeks of questioning. John’s wife is also questioned and finds out that John was cheating on her. She throws John out of the house and files for divorce. Amy, who turns out to dumber then a box of rocks, tells Agent Smedlap that she and John met a few months back when he helped her change a flat tire, and they hit it off.

She doesn’t know who Omar or Abdul are and only goes to the protests because she is against global warming and wants the power station, which uses coal, to be shut down. She is furious with John and wants to know what he got her into.

John confirms how they met and tells Agent Smedlap that he was only interested in her because she has a mouth like a Hoover and is really well stacked. Because of all the publicity, John’s boss at XYZ Corporation, under pressure from Agent Smedlap’s superiors as well as the Media, fires John. John doesn’t know who Omar and Abdul are and doesn’t know anything about a call from Abdul. Agent Smedlap’s superiors decide there isn’t enough to hold John and let him go, however, John’s marriage and reputation have been destroyed. All because of a wrong number and Agent Smedlap being able to search through John’s metadata without a search warrant.

Now this is an extreme example, but consider what has been coming out of Washington for the last month. The IRS abusing and repressing conservative groups, the Justice Department lying to get a warrant to search through a Fox News reporter’s phone records AND the records of his parents, AP having all THEIR phone records from 20+ phone lines searched, and the list is growing daily.

So, how may terrorist attacks have been stopped by using the metadata of 100 million people? The Government says dozens but won’t tell us any details. The few that have leaked out are already being called bogus by journalists. The Boston Bombers weren’t stopped. In all probability, not one single attack was stopped by the Government trolling through people’s personal metadata.

Generally, the American People don’t have a problem with the government spying on terrorists and foreigners OUTSIDE the United States. They have big problems with them spying on people INSIDE the United States, especially American Citizens who have done NOTHING WRONG.

Now some people might say that companies like Google and Verizon gather and use this data all the time. This is true, However, they only use what they need to run their businesses. They don’t want to keep years and years worth of data of they don’t have to. More importantly, they can’t PUT YOU IN JAIL! Yes there are issues with what Google and other companies do with that data, but that can and is being dealt with through the civil courts and other lawful means.

So, here is your answer regarding metadata and what it can be used for. They can track your movements and see who you might be talking with. Until recently, the government could also slap a GPS beacon on your car. That was slapped down by the Supreme Court. With Metadata, they don’t need a GPS tracker placed on your car. You are carrying one around with you right now. In fact, you might be reading this post from your phone. Say hello to Agent Smedlap when you see him Mr. Gutfeld.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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