Slashdot Mirror
Matt Blaze Examines Communications Privacy
altjira writes "Matt Blaze analyzes the implications of a recent Newsweek story on the Bush administration's use of the NSA for domestic spying on communications, and questions whether the lower legal threshold for the collection of communications metadata is giving away too much to the government: 'As electronic communication pervades more of our daily lives, transaction records — metadata — can reveal quite a bit about us, indeed often much more than a few out-of-context conversations might. Aggregated into databases with other people's records (or perhaps everyone's records) and analyzed by powerful software, metadata by itself can paint a remarkably detailed picture of connections, relationships, and other patterns that could never be recovered simply from listening to the conversations themselves.'"
i) The Gubmint is evil and should be destroyed
ii) This surveillance, and more, is necessary for the Gubmint to save us from all those nasty Tourists
Says it all really
How? How does it even affect us in the slightest, that some peripheral details of our phone calls might be in a government database? I don't give a damn if the NSA know I talked to Mom on Christmas Day, as long as they aren't listening to the conversation.
And how did you become such an expert on terrorist organisations, pray tell?
Seems like these days everyone on Slashdot is not only pretending to be a lawyer, but a politician, cryptographer, and expert on international criminal behaviors as well.
Why would the NSA or the FBI want to waste their time looking at records of me calling Mom? They're looking for criminals and terrorists. That's ALL they're looking for. They wouldn't bother with this kind of metadata if they werent finding stuff in it that related to criminals and terrorists.
Therefore I invoke Occam's razor, which in this case means assuming that the NSA and the FBI know more about what terrorists and criminals do than Mr Techmeology of Slashdot does.