Jonathan Mayer's education path is unusual: He has earned a Stanford law degree while working on his Ph.D. in computer science. He did research with a fellow doctoral candidate to discredit NSA claims that sensitive information about American citizens cannot be gleaned in the "metadata" the spy agency gathers from millions of phone calls.

Law and computer science both have their codes, but they're disparate. Legal code is often fuzzy and qualitative. Computer code is precise and quantitative. Not surprisingly, law and computer science tend to attract different people. It's not that the twain shall never meet; it's just that they seldom do.

Mayer is the exception. He has received his law degree and is completing his PhD in computer science, both at Stanford. Along the way he has aimed his double-barreled expertise at the National Security Agency's practice of collecting various forms of electronic information, including telephone metadata of Americans: the phone number of every caller and recipient, the unique serial number of the phones involved, the time and duration of each phone call.

Working with fellow Stanford computer science doctoral candidate Patrick Mutchler, Mayer proved that the NSA was wrong when it claimed that its analysts could not tease detailed personal information from phone metadata searches.

"Phone numbers, as it turns out, aren't just phone numbers," said Mayer, who is also a cybersecurity fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. "They're an avenue for finding out detailed information about individual citizens."

Aleecia McDonald, the director of privacy for the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, said Mayer's research irrefutably demonstrated that phone metadata is anything but trivial.

"The lovely thing about Jonathan's research is that it made the sensitivity of phone metadata concrete," McDonald said. "The country was told that phone metadata were not worth constitutional protection, and now Jonathan's research confirms otherwise."

McDonald said Mayer's research confirmed the sense of unease felt by many Americans, which could have ramifications beyond the current metadata debate.

"Mobile phones are basically tracking devices, but in addition to geographic data, Jonathan showed you can obtain rich information on daily lives and associations," she said. "This speaks directly to strongly protected privacy issues. No one is calling for stopping all surveillance, but these new dragnet programs essentially treat everyone as criminals and terrorists all the time. People are wondering if they can trust government on anything, and that's dangerous."

Mayer talks to CBS News about his metadata project

Mayer's ability to have significant public impact while still a young academic stems directly from his unusual combination of legal and computer acumen, according to John C. Mitchell, the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in the School of Engineering and Stanford vice provost for online learning. Mitchell, who is Mayer's adviser, is a professor of computer science and, by courtesy, of electrical engineering.

"That ability to apply high technology to legal issues, to understand both fields so deeply – well, not many people have those skill sets," said Mitchell. "In fact, he seems one of a kind. We're lucky to have him working on these issues. I don't know anyone else who could do it."

Go 'geekward,' young man

Mayer traces his interest in computer science – his "geekward leanings," as he puts it – to his childhood in Chicago, where he logged a lot of time on his family's Apple IIGS computer. Once, when he received an elementary school writing assignment, he developed a web page instead. This was in the early stages of the World Wide Web, and his accomplishment engendered both respect and confusion.

As his facility with computers grew, he became increasingly interested in security issues. This was sometimes expressed in unorthodox – even mischievous – fashion. He couldn't help but hack.

One holiday, he recalled, he received a Radio Shack watch that had a TV remote control feature. After fiddling a bit, he discovered that by setting the frequency for a Sony TV, pointing his device at the infrared port on certain Apple computers and hitting channel change, he could force the computer to reboot.

"My school used those kinds of computers, so I spent quite a bit of time pushing channel change when kids were on the computers at school," Mayer said. "They were mystified. I have to admit it was fun, but it also got me thinking about computer vulnerabilities."

Computer science quickly became a focus for Mayer during his undergraduate studies at Princeton. But he also developed interests in public policy and politics – subjects that had previously struck him as dreary.

"They just seemed somewhat vapid and tedious," Mayer said. "But my roommates were intensely interested in policy and politics, and they gradually won me over. I saw that both are viable paths for implementing change, for getting real things done."

His faculty adviser, Princeton computer science and public affairs Professor Ed Felten, reinforced that. Mayer's senior thesis reflected the merging of his interests: It was about web privacy – balancing computer science research with law and policy issues.

Taking dual paths

After graduating from Princeton in 2009 with a degree in public policy, Mayer came directly to Stanford with the intention of becoming, as he tells it, the first student to simultaneously pursue a JD in law and a PhD in computer science (CS).

"I wasn't going to do law and policy lite or CS-lite," Mayer told the Stanford Daily in February. "I was going full in on both."

Among his successes on the legal front: He was recently asked to teach a class at Stanford Law. The seminar explores the legal ramifications of security and privacy in the technology sector, emphasizing "areas of law that are frequently invoked, hotly contested or ripe for reform," according to the course overview.

He finds his new instructor role rewarding: "I get a kick out of the fact that I'm an engineer teaching law at Stanford."

His legal accomplishments notwithstanding, Mayer's computer science efforts – particularly his metadata research – have made more of a public splash. And as so often happens at Stanford, it all started with a conversation among peers.

"Patrick [Mutchler] and I were talking with our adviser [Mitchell] shortly after the Edward Snowden revelations," Mayer recalled. "We were really intrigued by the NSA's programs, especially all the claims and counterclaims about phone metadata. There was a lot of conjecture at that point but very little scientific clarity. So we thought we'd try to bring some focus to bear."

But Mayer and Mutchler found it difficult to acquire the metadata. While the NSA could harvest it directly from telecommunications companies, the Stanford doctoral students had to solicit phone records from the public.

"We realized we might be able to get metadata voluntarily through crowdsourcing," Mayer said. "So we posted an explanation on a Stanford website and provided an Android app that allowed people to send us their data. Crowdsourcing is a pretty risky basis for research, of course, because you never know what you're going to get. We would've been very happy with 100 responses – instead, we got about 500, and we were off to the races."

Metadata was revealing

Again, this innovative tactic took root in the confluence of legal and computing expertise.

"Building and distributing the app was within the capabilities of many computer experts, but its application was very clever," Mitchell said. "The rationale was: 'We would like to see what the NSA sees, but we don't want to behave like the NSA. So how do we do that?' Seeking volunteers willing to provide their phone data and devising and distributing the app was an extremely creative, sophisticated – and effective—approach."

In the course of their analysis, Mayer and Mutchler derived many revealing inferences from the metadata that show who called whom, when, from where to where and how often. For example, they could determine where the subjects lived and worked, and could see some intimation of relationships between the volunteers.

In some cases, the researchers were able to identify who was dating whom. One volunteer contacted a pharmaceutical hotline for multiple sclerosis patients, a management service for rare medical conditions, a specialty pharmacy and several neurology medical groups. Another called several locksmiths, a hydroponics dealer, a head shop and a home improvement store.

Those findings, Mayer drily observed, debunked the NSA's original assertions that phone metadata were impenetrable.

"It gave us pause," he said. "It was pretty clear that we could tease out more sensitive information with some elbow grease."

The findings have caused headaches for the NSA, and Mayer sees waning support for the agency's aggressive pursuit of private information. A number of high-profile cases on metadata are either pending or wending their way through the courts, and the entire program is up for renewal, or cancellation, in 2015. In May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to halt the National Security Agency's wholesale collection of domestic phone records. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the U.S. Senate's intelligence committee, signaled she is amenable to supporting a companion bill.

What's Next?

Mayer, who has received his JD and recently passed the California Bar Exam, expects to complete his computer science PhD in 2015. And after that?

"I would like to go to Washington, to try to bring technical rigor to federal policy," Mayer said, "though I'm aware there's always the danger of sinking into the political morass in that town. I'm working on a start-up NGO that I hope can bridge D.C. and Silicon Valley. In the interim, I just enjoy teaching at the law school."

Glen Martin is a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter based in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Recap: Pascal Lamy Lecture, “World Trade and Global Governance”

Save the Date: The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World

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Adam Tooze will deliver three lectures from his forthcoming book, A World Fit for Heroes. In particular, he will speak about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917. Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history.

Meet our Visiting Scholars:  Manfred Nowak 

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Manfred Nowak (LL.M., Columbia University, 1975) is Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor; Visiting Professor, Stanford Law School; and, Professor of Law, University of Vienna. One of the world’s most renowned human rights scholars and legal theorists, Nowak has published more than 400 books and articles on international, constitutional, administrative, and human rights law, including the standard commentary on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. He was the Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights at the University of Utrecht (1987-1989), and he founded the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in 1989. From 1996-2003, Nowak was a judge at the Human Rights Chamber in Bosnia. He has also served as a U.N. legal expert on missing persons and enforced disappearances, and was appointed the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment in 2004. 

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Europe and the Global Economy

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We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.

Special Event:  Pascal Lamy Lecture

“World Trade and Global Governance”

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Date: February 10, 2014 

Meet our Visiting Scholars:  Bjørn Høyland 

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n Høyland (PhD, London School of Economics, 2005) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is currently visiting Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow at The Europe Center, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Global. The focus of his research is European Union politics and comparative legislative politics. Professor Høyland’s list of journal publications includes the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and European Union Politics. His textbook (with Simon Hix) The Political System of the European Union (3rd ed) is the standard text for advanced courses on the European Union.

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Europe and the Global Economy

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The electoral eruption of anti-European Union populism is a reflection of structural flaws in that body but does not represent a fatal political blow, according to Stanford scholars.

In the May 25 elections for the European Parliament, anti-immigration parties won 140 of the 751 seats, well short of control, but enough to rattle supporters of the EU, which has 28 member nations. In Britain, Denmark, France and Greece, the political fringe vote totals stunned the political establishments.

Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama said the rise of extremism and anti-elitism is not surprising in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn and subsequent high levels of unemployment throughout Europe. In one sense, the EU elites have themselves to blame, he said.

"The elites who designed the EU and the eurozone failed in a major way," he said. "There was a structural flaw in the design of the euro (monetary union absent fiscal union, and the method of disciplining countries once in the zone)," said Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Research Afflilate at The Europe Center.

Some have argued that the European Union should adopt a form of fiscal union because without one, decisions about taxes and spending remain at the national level.

As Fukuyama points out, this becomes a problem, as in the case of a debt-ridden Greece, which he believes should not have qualified for EU membership in the first place. In fact, he said, it would have been better for Greece itself to leave the euro at the outset of the 2008 crisis.

Still, Fukuyama said the big picture behind the recent election is clear – it was a confluence of issues and timing.

"It is a bit like an off-year election in the U.S., where activists are more likely to vote than ordinary citizens," he said.

Fukuyama believes the EU will survive this electoral crisis. "I think the EU will be resilient. It has weathered other rejections in the past. The costs of really exiting the EU are too high in the end, and the elites will adjust, having been given this message," he said.

Meanwhile, the populist parties in the different countries are not unified or intent on building coalitions with each other.

"Other than being anti-EU, most of them have little in common," Fukuyama said. "They differ with regard to specific positions on immigration, economic policy, and they respond to different social bases."

Ongoing anger

Dan Edelstein, a professor of French, said the largest factor for success by extremist candidates was "ongoing anger toward the austerity policy imposed by the EU," primarily by Germany.

Edelstein estimates that a large majority of French voters are still generally supportive of the EU. For the time being, the anti-EU faction does not have a majority, though they now have much more representation in the European Parliament.

Edelstein noted existing strains among the anti-EU parties – for example, the UK Independence Party in Britain has stated that it would not form an alliance with the National Front party in France.

Immigration remains a thorny issue for some Europeans, Edelstein said.

"'Immigration' in most European political debates, tends to be a synonym for 'Islam.' While there are some countries, such as Britain, that are primarily worried about the economic costs of immigration, in most continental European countries, the fears are cultural," he said.

As Edelstein put it, Muslims are perceived as a "demographic threat" to white or Christian Europe. However, he is optimistic in the long run.

"It seems a little early to be writing the obituary of the EU. Should economic conditions improve over the next few years, as they are predicted to, we will likely see this high-water mark of populist anger recede," said Edelstein.

Cécile Alduy, an associate professor of French, writes in the May 28 issue of The Nation about how the ultra-right-wing National Front came in first place in France's election.

"This outcome was also the logical conclusion of a string of political betrayals, scandals and mismanagement that were only compounded by the persistent economic and social morass that has plunged France into perpetual gloom," she wrote.

Historian J.P. Daughton said that like elsewhere in the world, immigration often becomes a contentious issue in Europe in times of economic difficulties.  

"High unemployment and painful austerity measures in many parts of Europe have led extremist parties to blame immigrants for taking jobs and sapping already limited social programs," he said.

Anti-immigration rhetoric plays particularly well in EU elections, Daughton said. "Extremist parties portray European integration as a threat not only to national sovereignty, but also to national identity.

Edelstein, Alduy and Daughton are all Faculty Affiliates of The Europe Center.

Wake-up call

Russell A. Berman, a professor of German studies and comparative literature, said many Europeans perceive the EU as "somehow impenetrable, far from the civic politics of the nation states."

As a result, people resent regulations issued by an "intangible bureaucracy," and have come to believe that the European Parliament has not grappled with major issues such as mustering a coherent foreign policy voice, he said.

"The EU can be great on details but pretty weak on the big picture," said Berman, who is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Faculty Affiliate of The Europe Center. "It is this discrepancy that feeds the dissatisfaction."

Yet he points out that the extremist vote surged in only 14 nations of the EU – in the other 14, there was "negligible extremism," as he describes it.

"We're a long way from talking about a fatal blow, but the vote is indeed a wake-up call to the centrists that they have to make a better case for Europe," Berman said.