[otakucode]

This same researcher has been working in this area for awhile, and this is not an unexpected extension of things he's developed previously - like how to take standard video and determine the pulse of any people present (search on 'non-eulerian video magnification'). He's been working in what you can recover from the variations present in video which others have written off as 'noise' for awhile. I wouldn't be surprised if he just stumbled upon the effect sound had while doing other analysis.

I haven't looked, but if the NSA was involved with this, its usually easy to find out. Just look for any grants involved and look up the source of the grant. They don't usually hide their involvement in funding research. Pretty much any study done in the past 10 years about manipulating social graphs was funded by the NSA.