Software options not guaranteed to disguise calling records: Experts

Americans suddenly fearful that the US government could easily get information pertaining to their telephone calls have software options to disguise their calling records.

However according to information specialists if the government really wanted to get the information, it would most likely could get it finally.

The Obama administration yesterday defended its action on telephone records as part of its counterterrorism efforts.

This comes following the The Guardian publishing a secret court order authorising the collection of phone records generated by Verizon Communications customers (See: Obama administration secretly collecting records of Verizon calls).

According to experts, while there existed plenty of services that could make a phone number anonymous, or mask where someone was calling from, the government could still get most of the data it wanted quite easily.

According to Justin Brookman, director of Center for Democracy, it was really hard to feel completely confident that one was untraceable.

If a Skype user called a Verizon user, for instance, the government would see the call was made but would not be able to detect the identity of the Skype user, according to Fred Cate, an Indiana University professor specialising in information privacy law.

Cate added, the government could, though, request the IP address from the video and online calling service.

Although there were programmes that encrypted the content of phone conversations, according to Cate, some encrypted data could still tell the government when and to whom calls were made – not only the substance of the call itself.

While in the Verizon case, the alleged court order covered each phone number dialed by customers, along with location, the phone calls' contents were not revealed.

Meanwhile, according to commentators, a political storm might be brewing for president Obama following the revelation the NSA was conducting wholesale spying on the communications data of American citizens.

The revelation came after The Guardian found the National Security Agency (NSA) was currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon.

 Since the records from Verizon, a leading telecom operator in the US, were being collected, it meant that the communications ''meta data'' of millions of Americans was being scrutinised by the NSA, without people even being aware of the intrusion, and regardless of whether they were under suspicion of having committed any thing wrong.