Here’s A Tool To See What Your Email Metadata Reveals About You

Earlier this week, Mike Masnick of Techdirt complained that anyone who dismisses the NSA’s collection of metadata around people’s phone calls and emails (as revealed in the Snowden Leaks) “because it’s ‘just metadata’ doesn’t know what metadata is.” The argument is that you can learn a lot about who a person associates with and what they might talk about without actually reading their emails or listening to their phone calls. Coincidentally, MIT Media Lab released a tool this month that allows people to analyze their own email metadata. Called Immersion, it scrapes a user’s Gmail account looking only at the metadata (From, To, Cc and Timestamp fields of the emails) to present an overview of their network.

Forbes

The above article introduced me to Immersion, another great project to come out of MIT. It maps your gmail history, looking at the to, from, date sent fields and creates a spatial diagram for analysis.

If this is a taste of what can be done via free ware, then imagine what the geniuses at NSA can do with our metadata?

So when it comes to hiding your online info from the feds, the Silent Circle guys were correct, don’t participate!

So what could be done to drop under the radar?

Emails and conversation can be encrypted, but the spooks still know who has been talking to who.

I’m still looking into this, and am thinking currently that the Deep Web could be the only answer, after all it was created by, and for, the US Navy… but surely they’d have a back door?