How cellphone metadata helped UN tribunal charge Hezbollah with Lebanese truckbomb assassination

[uhnope]

Sorry, Snowwald, but metadata is helping fight the worst kinds of criminals. Personally I am not concerned that my metadata--just the time and location of calls, etc--is saved in some database somewhere to be used if needed in investigations to foil car bombers or hunt them down before the next one.

This article is amazing and deserves to be read in full. The main hero who discovered how to use the metadata, Lebanese security officer Wissam Eid, was himself assassinated for uncovering the Hezbollah connection.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/the-hezbollah-connection.html

The Hezbollah Connection

At the time, law-enforcement agencies worldwide were far less sophisticated than they are today about what can be derived from cellphone use. Some criminal elements were aware that an intelligence service might be able to listen in on calls, but few if any had thought about the value of metadata, the seemingly innocuous information about when and where a call is made or even just a phone’s location at a given moment. (You can call a cellphone and get an answer within seconds because cellphones, when they are on, constantly check in with whatever cell tower is nearest.)

At Eid’s request, a judge ordered Lebanon’s two cellphone companies, Alfa and MTC Touch, to produce records of calls and text messages in Lebanon in the four months before the bombing. Eid then studied the records in secret for months. He focused on the phone records of Hariri and his entourage, looking at whom they called, where they went, whom they met and when. He also followed where Adass, the supposed suicide bomber, spent time before he disappeared. He looked at all the calls that took place along the route taken by Hariri’s entourage on the day of the assassination. Always he looked for cause and effect. How did one call lead to the next? “He was brilliant, just brilliant,” the senior U.N. investigator told me. “He himself, on his own, developed a simple but amazingly efficient program to set about mining this massive bank of data.”

The simple algorithm quickly revealed a peculiar pattern. In October 2004, just after Hariri resigned, a certain cluster of cellphones began following him and his now-reduced motorcade wherever they went. These phones stayed close day and night, until the day of the bombing — when nearly all 63 phones in the group immediately went dark and never worked again.
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Eid spent a year coaxing patterns out of the data. Then he began to present a series of secret reports to his superiors and, eventually, to the U.N. team. He was certain that a large and well-trained team of operatives had used a network of cellphones to carry out the assassination. Eid also reported a preliminary — and dangerous — conclusion. He had evidence linking the phone network to senior members of Hezbollah. These suspicions were strengthened when he got a call from a senior Hezbollah operative, who had somehow learned of his investigation. According to a report years later by CBC News, the operative confirmed that some of the phones did belong to members of Hezbollah, but he claimed that they were using them to investigate an Israeli conspiracy.

Undeterred, Eid pressed on.

Read it all http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/the-hezbollah-connection.html