is it possible to get text message transcripts

'Our intuition for terms such as 'two hops,', proves wildly inaccurate when applied to modern telephone networks.' And he notes that NSA has vastly more data and resources than academic researchers. 'The study has important implications for surveillance law and policy,' says Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist and data privacy expert at Princeton University. 'Their presence makes some of the legal limitations on the NSA's access to metadata totally ineffective,' assuming the goal of the two-hop limit is to reduce unnecessary intrusion into people's private lives. 'The existing literature on telephone graph structure hadn't really mentioned these hubs,' Mutchler says.

Even with a two-hop limitation, an NSA analyst could in principle 'hop' to an additional 25,000 people from any one individual. But the study found that a large proportion of their subjects were connected to each other not through personal relationships but through customer service lines, telemarketers, and two-factor authentication services such as those used by Google. In an attempt to limit the scope of phone metadata surveillance, NSA is purportedly following a 'two-hop' rule: For any given person of interest, metadata can only be harvested from people called by that person, and then also people called by them. The goal of the study was to 'put hard data behind these hunches.' The more important revelation, he says, is the shape of a graph that charts phone call networks. The sensitivity of phone metadata is 'common knowledge in the security and privacy communities,' Mutchler says. Even deeply private details such as chronic health problems, religious affiliations, and drug use emerged by simply linking people to various clinics, stores, and organizations through their call records. By using public information and cheap commercial databases to map phone numbers to businesses, organizations, and social media profiles, metadata revealed the location and identity of most of the people, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, the metadata revealed quite a lot. If their privacy really is protected, then the records of their 1.2 million text messages and 250,000 calls should reveal little. More than 800 people downloaded the app and consented. Once installed on a smart phone, it collects the phone numbers and timing of every call and text message made and received. Unlike NSA, the researchers collected their data with consent from people who downloaded an app called MetaPhone. Ever since then, a trio of computer scientists from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California-Jonathan Mayer, Patrick Mutchler, and John Mitchell-has been harvesting phone metadata themselves to see what can be revealed. A White House spokesperson reassured the public in 2013 that the metadata harvesting 'does not allow the government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls,' leaving privacy intact.

NSA's intrusion into citizen's private lives may have roiled academics, but it has remained unclear what the spy agency was learning from phone metadata. Government officials have downplayed the sensitivity of such data, but a crowdsourced study of phone metadata now finds that highly revealing information can be gleaned from a simple list of who called whom. National Security Agency (NSA) is harvesting vast amounts of it from telephone calls. It's an obscure data science term that was unknown to most people until 2013, when they learned that the U.S.

Is it possible to get text message transcripts