Schneier: Metadata Equals Surveillance

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Bruce Schneier writes that lots of people discount the seriousness of the NSA's actions by saying that it's just metadata — after all the NSA isn't really listening in on everybody's calls — they're just keeping track of who you call. 'Imagine you hired a detective to eavesdrop on someone,' writes Schneier. 'He might plant a bug in their office. He might tap their phone.' That's the data. 'Now imagine you hired that same detective to surveil that person. The result would be details of what he did: where he went, who he talked to, what he looked at, what he purchased — how he spent his day. That's all metadata.' When the government collects metadata on the entire country, they put everyone under surveillance says Schneier. 'Metadata equals surveillance; it's that simple.'"

Comments

Metadata is the most important data

[i kan reed]

This is a basic fact for anyone dealing with any substantive volume of data. The details are of no interest to anyone in power, but patterns are.

The dividing line people will have here is whether the 4th amendment(and the human right it's based on) protects a right to privacy or a right against freely targed witchhunt prosecutions. This spying won't especially invade the first, but could easily be construed to lead to the second.

Re:Metadata is the most important data

[icebike]

The details are of no interest to anyone in power, but patterns are.

It has already been made public that huge volumes of email, actual phone conversations are recorded.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-spying-flap-extends-to-contents-of-u.s-phone-calls/
http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/15/yes-actually-the-nsa-says-they-can-eaves
http://www.dailyfinance.com/on/irs-audit-emails-warrant-aclu/

And further, the NSA leaks content to local and state law enforcement.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_nsa_dea_police_state_tango/

So the this whole discussion about meta-data is moot. When you can archive, transcribe and catalog content, who needs metadata?

Re:Metadata is the most important data

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because the importance of an inalienable right is judged by the number of the amendment. Good thing they are only violating our 4th amendment rights in passing on the way to the 2nd amendment.

Re:Metadata is the most important data

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't guarantee the general privacy of the masses you don't have freedom of association. In my mind freedom of association is suppose to be that guarantee. Unfortunately the government uses assumptions / suspicions that are not founded on hard evidence to target groups of people. As an example they targeted everybody who accessed services / web sites hosted by Freedom Hosting. If you ask me that was illegal. The same thing can be said about monitoring a group organizing publicly. There is a huge difference between policing a general population and targeting population with surveillance even if many of its members are involved in criminal acts, and then targeting those within, when those within are not themselves necessarily committing illegal acts. You should not assume / suspect me of committing an illegal act simply because I'm associating with a group whose individual members are known to be committing crimes. A few good examples of this would be KKK groups, communist groups, civil rights groups, various African American groups like the Black Panther Party, LGBT groups, pedophilia groups, free software groups (yes, they were targets of the IRS under the Obama administration), etc.

Re:Metadata is the most important data

[icebike]

But if you had bothered to even give those links a cursory look, you would find that they DO CARE what you said, and if the NSA doesn't personally care, they know agencies that do, and they freely share what they learn.

The story is fairly straightforward. A unit of the DEA known as the Special Operations Division has been receiving and distributing vast levels of intelligence from agencies such as the NSA, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security. Upon receiving information about a particular transaction or meeting place, DEA agents go make arrests, using traffic stops as pretext.

There is nothing "beneath them". In order to hold that view, you have to subscriber to the whole "Defenders of America" flag wrapping nonsense. These agencies have ceased working for YOU.

You can't worry about the consequences will have on the people, and ignore the fact that some how, somewhere along the line, this government has taken it upon itself to vet every communication, be party to ever conversation, and monitor every action, and watch every person. Where did that idea of government EVER come from?

Re:Metadata is the most important data

[Anonymous Coward]

At least the NSA isn't going to tell my employer to fire me.

No, no no. Oh, no, of course not. They wouldn't tell anyone to fire anyone.

What happens is men in suits come to your office and speak with the boss behind closed doors. Then they speak with the coworkers. They ask questions about what you were doing, how you work with other people. Has anyone seen you get angry, raise your voice, raise your fist, get a little violent? Do you have weapons? Do you bring them to work?

The details are fuzzy, but when I worked as a student worker at a big university back in the 90's, exactly this happened to one of my coworkers, courtesy of the CIA. The men introduced themselves as such, didn't suggest that we couldn't speak about the meeting (though he suggested we not discuss the boss's closed door meeting), but isn't that the point? Everyone knew the guy was being investigated for something. Things got awkward, and eventually the guy was let go because nobody wanted to work with him anymore.

Re:Metadata is the most important data

[bigfoottoo]

I absolutely agree that they are scooping up EVERYTHING. When the Snowden story first broke, the government story was that they were collecting metadata on 3 billion US phone calls per day. They acted like this was a big deal. But, think about it. Suppose that each metadata entry requires 100 bytes. In this case, they are collecting 300 GBytes of meta data per day. Hell, I can store that much on my laptop! Instead, they are bringing an exa-Byte facility online in Utah, and they are building another giant farm at Ft. Meade. Something doesn't add up. I suspect that the raw data stream goes into the NSA "haystack" where it sits. So when Obama said, "Nobody is listening to your phone calls.", he technically was correct. Your phone calls are recorded, but nobody is listening to them. The voice data sits in the archive until probable cause is established by examining metadata. Once probable cause is established, an analyst gets to listen to everything you have muttered on the phone over the last several years. This retroactive aspect of NSA actions is truely disgusting. There probably are many good people in the NSA. But, there also were many good Germans doing bad things in WWII. Or, what we often did in Vietnam. The NSA, as an institution, seems to dispise the Bill of Rights, and unless this is changed, we will lose our nation.

Re:Metadata is the most important data

[icebike]

The technology that Google Voice uses, and that Android phones use, and even iPhones use to convert voice to text would allow them to grind away at those recorded conversations and weed out the "Honey pick up some milk on the way home" conversations and dump these to save space.

Meanwhile any talk of interesting subjects would get added to the text database for searching, and the audio saved.

Nobody "listened" to that call. But a computer did, and translated it, and cataloged it and made it searchable. And a human will listen to it, and so will the judge and jury any time the government wants to hang you out to dry for getting an ounce of weed, or a stock tip, or any little discrepancy on your taxes.

Now that these abuses are known, I actually expect to see the data used more often. Because they don't need to worry about disclosing a secret project any more. We will be treated to all sorts of "see how surveillance is good for you" stories cherry picked and praises sung when the meth dealer gets caught or the pedophile gets outed. We are all in for the "Frogs in a kettle" treatment.

Big Data

[Anonymous Coward]

The result would be details of what he did: where he went, who he talked to, what he looked at, what he purchased — how he spent his day.

And with big data hitting the databases of Amazon (and every other retailer you shop), Google, credit cards, banks, credit bureaus, medical information bureau, IRS, .... they can find out just about anything they want about you.

When you turn off Ghostery, NoScript and AdBlock, it's pretty fucking eerie the ads that are placed on pages - and that's JUST the marketing people. Just image what the NSA can do!

Yep! Made fun of the Tin Foil hat wearers all those years and we're RIGHT!

Give people time...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's gonna take awhile for everyone to get upto speed on this whole 'spying on everyone' thing.
Heck just 5 years ago if you made the statement 'the goverment is spying on all of us'. You'd get some sort of response involving tinfoil and hats even tho it was 100% true 5 years ago as it is today.

And now... People are starting to realize it wasn't just crazy tinfoil hat ramblings... Give them some time and they'll wise up. Somewhat...
Nother 10 years we might be able to even start fixing the problem. But i wouldn't bet on it.

Metadata

[LoraxLobster0202]

Metada is as private as the contents is. However, I can't loose the the feeling, that somehow entire debate is being spun as if society "accepts" that metadata does not matter. It matters. The thing is that if existing law would be followed " The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized", then most of NSA would be out of work. The Irony is that one, merely mentioning his rights is automatically classified as potential terroris http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/ridiculous-dhs-list-you-might-be-domestic-ter

Re:The USSC has said otherwise

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, while they did say that collecting metadata did not constitute a search, they have never said that putting someone under surveillance was a search either. The police do not need a search warrant to follow you around. In 1979, when the Supreme Court made the ruling in question, the metadata available was no more thorough than a police officer could obtain by following you around. Since that time, things have changed significantly. If a lawyer argued the case correctly, they could convince the court that it could overturn the precedent without having to find that the original ruling was a mistake.

US President Hides His Metadata

[Anonymous Coward]

The President of the United states refuses to divulge his visitor lists claiming that it might divulge privileged information. This has been going on for years under presidents of both parties. Visitor lists are metadata (who he talked to, not what they talked about). If the president recognizes his metadata is confidential, how can he claim other peoples' metadata is not confidential?

I propose Americans get metadata for politicians

[JoeyRox]

If the NSA collecting metadata on Americans isn't such a big deal then I propose the metadata for all politicians be posted on a publicly accessible website. I'm particularly interested in the phone records between Congress and K Street.

Not just the NSA

[ThatAblaze]

People seem to be losing sight of the fact that it isn't only the NSA that is doing this tracking. Europe and China are both huge on tracking, they just haven't had this kind of public leak. So, while the question of which US Constitutional Amendment has been breached is a good question, it doesn't address the larger picture question: Where do we, as citizens of whichever country, draw the line and force our governments to stop?

Re:Not just the NSA

[SirGarlon]

We don't care what China and Europe are doing.

Speak for yourself. The Slashdot audience is global and the problem is global.

a few thousand people killed 12 years ago did not give the government of the USA the right to start using the Constitution for toilet paper

Quite right: an apathetic public gave the government the ability (not the right) to violate its founding principles. The terrorist attacks were a pretext to accelerate the trend, not the real reason.

Re:So in other words...

[Zero__Kelvin]

Since metadata is data about data nobody ever questioned if metadata was data. The argument was that it wasn't important data. Of course, the simple question: If it isn't important data, then why gather it? seems to elude most people even to this day.

The metadata is how we figure you out

[WillAffleckUW]

the metadata is how we figure you out.

the data is just the evidence when we finally put you in jail for thoughtcrimes.

Re:police

[WillAffleckUW]

You guys still haven't understood you lived in a police state ?
What's it gonna take ??

When they start quartering troops (e.g. bots) in our houses (e.g. computers).

oh.

wait.

Never yield

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Politicians stole the word "metadata" from computer science, and declared it on-limits for warrantless spying. This is a sophistry, invented out of whole cloth.

The king of England would have used phone metadata to round up the Founding Fathers in quick order. Therefore government doesn't get to do this.

Stop government from building the tools of tyrrany to begin with. That is the meaning of the Constitution.