Phones and Social Networks

Now we all know that several major phone service providers have given all their records to the NSA for social network analysis. They say that they removed any personally identifying information, which I doubt since personal telephone numbers are often considered precisely that in medical record context. But whatever.

I don't think this will yield any useful results. The NSA can find out who knows who and calls who, but it's useless without names, addresses, all that identifying information that they don't have. And these are records from the past. Now that all the terrorists that read US news sources know about it, the smart ones will be sure to use prepaid cell phones which are rather more difficult to trace. Maybe the really smart ones may have been doing this for years.

The idea still bothers me, whether or not it will work. So I have a plan to render the whole thing useless. If the NSA wants my phone records, they're going to get them. All I can do is make those records meaningless. I always have extra minutes for my cell phone and my land line's long distance, and unlimited local calls. I intend from now on to use those resources to make random calls all over the country. Random numbers, times, lengths of call (to the extent that I can convince a stranger not to hang up on me). If enough people do that, the NSA will have a lot of useless information, and will hopefully stop collecting it.

I bet this gets me on a list somewhere. That's ok. At least that means someone's reading this.