As you may know, both the ACLU and EPIC have brought legal challenges to the NSA's collection of Americans' phone records and related traffic data (metadata). We at the Center for Internet and Society are writing an amicus brief on behalf of experts in metadata analysis to educate the Courts about how revealing such information can be. If you are potentially interested in signing on, please email me at jennifer at law dot stanford dot edu by July 25th. Also, if you have pointers to cutting edge research on this topic, please feel free to send the citations to me.
The brief will argue that Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment in telephone metadata because of the revealing inferences that analysts may readily draw from computerized analysis of such data. We will explain the state of the art research on metadata analysis from epidemiology, fraud detection, campaign research, targeted advertising and other related fields of study to substantiate our position. The brief will look at the invasiveness of such data collection with and without geolocation information.
The final brief will be available approximately July 26 for signers' review before one must commit completely.
For more on metadata and the Fourth Amendment, please see:
Information & Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, Canada: A Primer on Metadata: Separating Fact from Fiction
Center for Democracy and Technology (June 17, 2013): When Metadata Becomes Megadata: What the Government Can Learn