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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.
With thousands of agents with warrantless access, it will be trivial for a plant to track who a political opponent calls to flesh out their supporter network.
This will allow for mysterious IRS audits, in the worst case, or just rhetorical games to discredit people.
This is the reason government spy powers on citizens are supposed to be limited to warrants -- the goal was stopping those in power from harassing opponents.
The King of England would have traced phone call networks. And so the founding fathers would have banned it sans warrant.
The modern "metadata" concept is a complete unconstitutional fraud designed to pretend to honor this by asserting only the content of the call is private. Yet the connecting the dots is precisely and arguably more important.
Just get a damned warrant so it is all tracked and reviewed by elected officials.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.