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What Can You Find Out From Metadata?
cervesaebraciator writes "In the wake of recent revelations from Edward Snowden, apologists for the state security apparatus are predictably hitting the airwaves. Some are even 'glad' the NSA has been doing this. A major point they emphasize is that the content of calls have remained private and it is only the metadata that they're interested in. But given how much one can tell from interpersonal connections, does the surveillance only represent a 'modest encroachments on privacy?' It is easy enough to imagine how metadata on phone calls made to and from a medical specialist could be more revealing than we'd like. But social network analysis can reveal far more. Duke sociologist Kieran Healy, in a light-hearted but telling article, shows how one father of the American Revolution could have been identified using the simplest tools of social network analysis and only a limited dataset."
Why is it suddenly a big deal now?
NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls
Updated 5/11/2006 10:38 AM ET
By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY
"The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans â" most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews."
http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm
I voted for Obama twice.
Then you have no one to blame but yourself. Obama openly supported warrantless wiretaps before his election in 2004.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You need content only to create initial suspicion. Metadata is quite enough to find out whom else to wiretap.
I do expect however that with the next NSA datacenter or at the latest the one after that they will try to go for full or nearly full voice data retention and analysis in the form for keword filters. I think this is approaching feasibility now. Then they can create initial suspicion from phone conversation contents. What they will also eventually want is full web browsing history, propably reduced to URIs, user-names and passwords. That one is a bit more tricky though, as it requires server-side cooperation for everything SSL, SSL interceptors are never truely invisible. Full email body retention and analysis are also certainly on that list and should be implemented shortly.
Just as a side-note let me remind everybody that all this has no preventative value against terrorism at all and servers only to identify politically undesirables early on and to create blackmail material for political use and similar applications. It may also serve to identify possible targets whenever the FBI needs to create a few more "terrorists", because there are not enough genuine ones.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
-Benjamin Franklin
"... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
-Thomas Jefferson
"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing."
John Adams
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government."
-Patrick Henry
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves."
-William Pitt
"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin."
Samuel Adams
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
Patrick Henry
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Did any of these people stop to consider that CPNI data is routinely sold by Verizon and all other carriers unless they specifically opt out?
How many Americans who are complaining about this have opted out of the CPNI sharing clause of their contracts?
You are already giving permission, by not opting out, to your wireless and landline carriers to sell your metadata to ANYONE for ANY REASON, including the government, who may buy it on the open market just like anyone else. This data is seldom anonymized, and when it is, you can still search for specific characteristics to find the information of a specific person. And, any entity willing to pay for the information may have it, and it can be bought through a third-party data aggregator who will de-anonymize it and bundle it with plenty of other interesting facts about YOU.
How many people have actually read their terms of service? Have they gone through the arcane process of opting out of the voluntary sharing of CPNI data? (Every year, for each carrier?) Will they now complain that no one warned them? Did they expect their politicians to keep them informed? If the politicians had tried, would they have listened? They didn't care when this became the norm 10 years ago, and now suddenly it's intrusive?
This is what happens when you don't pay attention.
That would get them to scream about it.
Imagine if we could actually hold our public officials accountable for their actions.
See here for what it actually looks like for one politician in Germany.
http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention
"Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet."
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Well for an improvement you could move to Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Chile, Mauritius, or Denmark....all ahead of the USA if you trust this source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
Not to mention the fact that the democracies which actually exist do not implement simple majority-rules tyrannies. They implement representative or hybrid representative / direct systems with significant checks on the power of majorities and minorities.
.: Semper Absurda