Slashdot Mirror
Metadata and the Intrusive State
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from an intriguing article at TechDirt about the sometimes very low-tech methods of the East German Stasi. They may have been using more pencils than computers, but they were gathering information on their targets using the same kind of metadata whose significance the U.S. government has lately been downplaying: "They amassed dossiers on about one quarter of the population of the country during the Communist regime. But their spycraft — while incredibly invasive — was also technologically primitive by today's standards. While researching my book Dragnet Nation, I obtained the above hand drawn social network graph and other files from the Stasi Archive in Berlin, where German citizens can see files kept about them and media can access some files, with the names of the people who were monitored removed. The graphic shows forty-six connections, linking a target to various people (an 'aunt,' 'Operational Case Jentzsch,' presumably Bernd Jentzsch, an East German poet who defected to the West in 1976), places ('church'), and meetings ('by post, by phone, meeting in Hungary')."
Guilt by association was one of their primary tools.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
At least it's not another slashvertisement, then.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is a great movie that came out in 2006 called "The Lives of Others" that provides an account of the practices of the Stasi. It may not have been completely accurate, but its nevertheless a good insight into what it was like and a great movie overall.
Obama. Obama says we should not be concerned that the NSA is collecting all our metadata.
Merry Old England would have rounded up the Founding Fathers using "just metadata" (who called whom, and when) and therefore they would have forbidden its collection to government without a proper warrant.
The US concept of The People forming a government inherently distrusts those in power, so specifically grants limited powers. It's not a case of "well, WE will use it right!". The power itself is what's wrong.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Here's a simple walkthrough of how easy social graph analysis is which demonstrates how invasive metadata is.
I think by that logic, you could also argue that the Magna Carta was bad.
It's quite possible that the more enlightened practices employed on the later colonial separations were influenced by both the example of what could happen when their separation was forbidden and by the model documents that the American revolution brought into being.