{"id":186098,"date":"2014-05-13T19:21:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-14T00:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/05\/13\/its-only-metadata-right\/"},"modified":"2014-05-13T19:21:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T00:21:00","slug":"its-only-metadata-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/05\/13\/its-only-metadata-right\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s Only Metadata, Right?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As David Cole observes, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/blogs\/nyrblog\/2014\/may\/10\/we-kill-people-based-metadata\/?insrc=wbll\">We Kill People Based on Metadata<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called \u201cmetadata\u201d\u2014who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person\u2019s most intimate associations and interests, and it\u2019s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, \u201cmetadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody\u2019s life. If you have enough metadata, you don\u2019t really need content.\u201d When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker\u2019s comment \u201cabsolutely correct,\u201d and raised him one, asserting, \u201c<b><span style=\"font-size: 100%; font-variant: small-caps;\">We kill people based on metadata<\/span><\/b>.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">It is precisely this power to collect our metadata that has prompted one of Congress\u2019s most bipartisan initiatives in recent years. On May 7, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to adopt an amended form of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans, initially proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. On May 8, the House Intelligence Committee, which has until now opposed any real reform of the NSA, also unanimously approved the same bill. And the Obama administration has welcomed the development. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(<i>Emphasis Mine<\/i>) <\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;signature strikes&#8221; that the CIA and Pentagon use are based entirely on metadata.<\/p>\n<p>The next time that you hear of a wedding party being blown-up by a drone, realize that the same thing could happen to you on the basis of your cell phone location data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As David Cole observes, &#8220;We Kill People Based on Metadata: Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called \u201cmetadata\u201d\u2014who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[971,1032,969,1066,1076],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-rights","category-crimes-against-humanity","category-evil","category-privacy","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186098"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}