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MetaPhone: The NSA’s Got Your Number

Posted on December 28, 2013July 1, 2025 by Dissent

Defenders of the NSA 215 program repeatedly note that the business records supplied by companies do not include the subscribers’ names. But how much effort does it take to attach names to numbers?

Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler write:

Trivial, we found. We randomly sampled 5,000 numbers from our crowdsourced MetaPhone dataset and queried the Yelp, Google Places, and Facebook directories. With little marginal effort and just those three sources—all free and public—we matched 1,356 (27.1%) of the numbers. Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6%) on Yelp, 684 (13.7%) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3%) on Facebook.

What about if an organization were willing to put in some manpower? To conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly sampled 100 numbers from our dataset, then ran Google searches on each. In under an hour, we were able to associate an individual or a business with 60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three initial sources, we were up to 73.

Read more on Web Policy.

Thanks to Joe Cadillic for this link.

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