MIT Immersion Project Reveals What NSA's PRISM Program Knows
NEWS ANALYSIS: If NSA's and Google's harvesting of your email metadata doesn't seem so scary, what big data visualization analysis shows really is frightening.
When I first heard about the National Security Agency's PRISM operation at a conference in Washington, D.C., it wasn't clear just how significant that might be. I knew that the government was collecting information from emails, including the name and address of the recipients, the originator, the time and date of the message, and perhaps the size of the message. But it wasn't clear just how much the government could glean from that.
But that was before it became clear exactly how effectively visualization tools can show the relationships between and among points of data. I found out a few days later just how effective that can be when I was introduced to its use as a cyber-security tool. Now it turns out that the same type of illustration is available from MIT, and it uses your own email to produce the illustration.
As Brian Fung reports in National Journal, this is the information that Google has available from your gmail account. If the government requests email data from Google, this is what the government gets. The tool, called Immersion, goes through your Gmail and reports to you on what it finds. Then Immersion displays it as a sort of bubble chart showing who you trade email with the most, and perhaps equally important, the relationship between those people.
If you look at the illustration at the top of this story, you'll see a cluster of colored bubbles. The size of those bubbles shows how much correspondence has happened between you and those people, effectively showing how important they may be in regards to you.
....
The NSA doesn't really need your permission to get this data because it can pick it up as it passes through certain parts of the Internet. Google can't do that, so it needs your account. There's not much you can do about the filtering of Internet data because your address information has to be readable if your email is going to get delivered.
http://www.eweek.com/security/mit-immersion-project-reveals-what-nsas-prism-program-knows/
You can test it yourself if you have a gmail account:
https://immersion.media.mit.edu/
Don't have Gmail?
Try a demo with real anonymized metadata.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I hope that's a good thing? 
It was pretty weird. It started out with this:
Traceback (most recent call last):
And then a whole bunch of: file/blah blah blah in a list
And then it ended with this:
InvalidClientSecretsError: File not found: "client_secrets.json"
(kidding)
