Slashdot Mirror
It's Trivially Easy To Identify You Based On Records of Your Calls and Texts (dailydot.com)
Reader erier2003 shares an article on Daily Dot: Contrary to the claims of America's top spies, the details of your phone calls and text messages -- including when they took place and whom they involved -- are no less revealing than the actual contents of those communications. In a study published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford University researchers demonstrated how they used publicly available sources -- like Google searches and the paid background-check service Intelius -- to identify "the overwhelming majority" of their 823 volunteers based only on their anonymized call and SMS metadata. The results cast doubt on claims by senior intelligence officials that telephone and Internet "metadata" -- information about communications, but not the content of those communications -- should be subjected to a lower privacy threshold because it is less sensitive. Contrary to those claims, the researchers wrote, "telephone metadata is densely interconnected, susceptible to reidentification, and enables highly sensitive inferences."IEEE has more details.
"We kill people based on metadata" -- Michael Hayden, former NSA chief, April 2014.
Challenge accepted, and not because I don't think you're an AC troll.
The founding fathers experienced what life was like when general warrants was law, and purposely limited the scope of how the government could collect information on citizens as well as provide oversight and justification when they do. History has shown us what happens when supposedly democratic governments are left unchecked in their abuse of surveillance powers and secret police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
Or perhaps something a little more closer to home?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
So from that context, compare to where we are today with mass surveillance, secret courts that judge secret law, and shadowy government agencies that can brazenly lie and are held unaccountable to even congress with their activities. (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/28/senators-james-clapper-nsa-data-collection)
Consider for a moment what happened to Thomas Drake and Joseph Nacchio, both men who stood in the way of expanding government surveillance. Consider them and all the other people who suddenly found themselves being punished, both directly and indirectly, for being whistleblowers and finding their lives and reputations in ruins or ending up in jail.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest elite are able to steer and control our political parties and policy through campaign contributions if not outright bribery. Not only is the banking industry too big to fail, according to the former Attorney General Eric Holder, they are too big to jail as well. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/11/us/politics/2016-presidential-election-super-pac-donors.html?_r=0
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/holder-concerned-megabanks-too-big-to-jail/2013/03/06/6fa2b07a-869e-11e2-999e-5f8e0410cb9d_story.html
Does this begin to paint a picture for you, about why even phone metadata should be guarded? What if, without even needing a warrant or any form of accountability, I could use this data to construct the total framework of your life: who you talk to, who your friends and family are, when you talk to them and where you are when you do, and anyone else that might make you guilty by association.
It isn't a coincidence that banks and those that run them are untouchable and are likely to stay that way, and there has never been more money in the political system than there is now.
It isn't a coincidence that domestic spying is ever expanding, while whistleblowers and reporters are being targeted like never before. Obama has charged people under the espionage act more times than any other president combined.
It isn't a coincidence that the FBI building still has Hoover's name on it, even after the legacy of COINTELPRO. Only now we live in a world where everyone has a digital footprint whether we want to or not, and most of us carry wireless devices that come equipped with gps, cameras and a microphone that we have no real control over. At some point, if we aren't there already, there will be a dossier on each and every last one of us that contains all of our lives' private details, including political association. Become a person of interest that interferes with the established eco-political power structure, and your life may become very interesting indeed.
Is that real enough of an answer for you?