Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Interesting to hear the Federal Reserve Chairman's swan song at Brookings Institution, wherein he referred to Government controlling the Legislature
Why Spying On Metadata Is Even MORE Intrusive than Listening to Content
The government has sought to reassure us that it is only tracking
“metadata” such as the time and place of our phone calls, and not the
content of the calls. There is substantial evidence from top whistleblowers that the government is recording the content of our calls and emails … word-for-word. And former CIA deputy director – and White House NSA spying panel member – Mike Morrell says that metadata is content. But even accepting the government’s claims at face value, technology experts say that “metadata” can be morerevealing than the content of your actual phone calls. For example, ARS Technica notes:
The ACLU filed a declaration by
Princeton Computer Science Prof. Edward Felten to support its quest for
a preliminary injunction in that lawsuit. Felten, a former technical
director of the Federal Trade Commission, has testified to Congress
several times on technology issues, and he explained why “metadata”
really is a big deal. *** There are already programs that make it easy for law enforcement and
intelligence agencies to analyze such data, like IBM’s Analyst’s
Notebook. IBM offers courses on how to use Analyst’s Notebook to understand call data better.
Court DocumentsUnlike the actual contents of calls and e-mails, the metadata about
those calls often can’t be hidden. And it can be incredibly
revealing—sometimes moreso than the actual content. Knowing who you’re calling reveals information that isn’t supposed to
be public. Inspectors general at nearly every federal agency, including
the NSA, “have hotlines through which misconduct, waste, and fraud can
be reported.” Hotlines exist for people who suffer from addictions to
alcohol, drugs, or gambling; for victims of rape and domestic violence;
and for people considering suicide. Text messages can measure donations to churches, to Planned Parenthood, or to a particular political candidate. Felten points out what should be obvious to those arguing “it’s just
metadata”—the most important piece of information in these situations is
the recipient of the call. The metadata gets more powerful as you collect it in bulk. For
instance, showing a call to a bookie means a surveillance target
probably made a bet. But “analysis of metadata over time could
reveal that the target has a gambling problem, particularly if the call
records also reveal a number of calls made to payday loan services.” The data can even reveal the most intimate details about people’s romantic lives. Felten writes:
Consider the following hypothetical example: A young
woman calls her gynecologist; then immediately calls her mother; then a
man who, during the past few months, she had repeatedly spoken to on the
telephone after 11pm; followed by a call to a family planning center
that also offers abortions. A likely storyline emerges that would not be
as evident by examining the record of a single telephone call.
With a five-year database of telephony data, these patterns can be
evinced with “even the most basic analytic techniques,” he notes. By collecting data from the ACLU in particular, the government could
identify the “John Does” in the organization’s lawsuits that have John
Doe plaintiffs. They could expose litigation strategy by revealing that
the ACLU was calling registered sex offenders, or parents of students of
color in a particular school district, or people linked to a protest
movement.
One of the most disingenuous arguments in the aftermath
of the NSA spying revelations is that the American people shouldn’t be
concerned about the government hoovering up its sensitive information
because it’s only metadata–or a fancy way of saying data about the data. *** A tool developed by MIT Media Lab proves how intrusive the collection
and analysis of metadata is over time, especially for those who are
overly reliant on email as their main method of communication. Dubbed “Immersion,” the tool analyzes the metadata–From, To, Cc and Timestamp fields– from a volunteer’s Gmail account and visualizes it. *** What you see here is a full analysis of my personal and professional networks over 8.8 years of using Gmail. *** Metadata, no matter what the detractors say, collected over time is
an intimate repository of our lives–whom we love, whom we’re friends
with, where we work, where we worship (or don’t), and whom we associate
with politically. The right to privacy means our metadata shouldn’t be
collected and analyzed without reasonable suspicion that we’ve done
something wrong.
“Calling patterns can reveal when we are awake and
asleep; our religion, if a person regularly makes no calls on the
Sabbath or makes a large number of calls on Christmas Day; our work
habits and our social aptitude; the number of friends we have, and even
our civil and political affiliations,” Mr. Felten wrote in a legal brief
filed in support of the ACLU’s case.
Metadata equals surveillance. Imagine you hired a detective to eavesdrop on someone. He might plant
a bug in their office. He might tap their phone. He might open their
mail. The result would be the details of that person’s communications.
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 people, the government puts
them under surveillance. When the government collects metadata on the
entire country, they put everyone under surveillance.
High-level NSA whistleblower Kirk Wiebe says that the government prefers metadata to content … since it gives more information. The ACLU notes:
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study a few years back found that reviewing people’s social networking contacts alone was sufficient to determine their sexual orientation. Consider, metadata from email communications was sufficient to identify the mistress of then-CIA Director David Petraeus and then drive him out of office. The “who,” “when” and “how frequently” of communications are often more revealing
than what is said or written. Calls between a reporter and a government
whistleblower, for example, may reveal a relationship that can be
incriminating all on its own. Repeated calls to Alcoholics Anonymous, hotlines for gay teens,
abortion clinics or a gambling bookie may tell you all you need to know
about a person’s problems. If a politician were revealed to have
repeatedly called a phone sex hotline after 2:00 a.m., no one would need
to know what was said on the call before drawing conclusions. In
addition sophisticated data-mining technologies have compounded the
privacy implications by allowing the government to analyze terabytes of
metadata and reveal far more details about a person’s life than ever
before.
What [government officials] are trying to say is that
disclosure of metadata—the details about phone calls, without the actual
voice—isn’t a big deal, not something for Americans to get upset about
if the government knows. Let’s take a closer look at what they are
saying:
They know you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. But they don’t know what you talked about.
They know you called the suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge. But the topic of the call remains a secret.
They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor,
then your health insurance company in the same hour. But they don’t know
what was discussed.
They know you received a call from the local NRA office while it was
having a campaign against gun legislation, and then called your
senators and congressional representatives immediately after. But the
content of those calls remains safe from government intrusion.
They know you called a gynecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then
called the local Planned Parenthood’s number later that day. But nobody
knows what you spoke about.
Sorry, your phone records—oops, “so-called metadata”—can reveal a lot
more about the content of your calls than the government is implying.
Metadata provides enough context to know some of the most intimate
details of your lives. And the government has given no assurances that
this data will never be correlated with other easily obtained data.
“When you take all those records of who’s communicating with who, you can build social networks and communities for everyone in the world,” mathematician and NSA whistle-blower
William Binney — “one of the best analysts in history,” who left the
agency in 2001 amid privacy concerns — told Daily Intelligencer. “And
when you marry it up with the content,” which he is convinced the NSA is
collecting as well, “you have leverage against everybody in the
country.”
“You are unique in the world,” Binney explained, based on the
identifying attributes of the machines you use. “If I want to know who’s
in the tea party, I can put together the metadata and see who’s
communicating with who. I can construct the network of the tea party. If
I want to pass that data to the IRS, then I can do that. That’s the
danger here.”
At The New Yorker,
Jane Mayer quoted mathematician and engineer Susan Landau’s
hypothetical: “For example, she said, in the world of business, a
pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending
corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive
medical information: ‘You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a
call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.’”
[Landau gives a more detailed explanation here.]
“There’s a lot you can infer,” Binney continued. “If you’re calling a
physician and he’s a heart specialist, you can infer someone is having
heart problems. It’s all in the databases.” The data, he said, is “all
compiled by code. The software does it all from the beginning — they
have dossiers of everyone in the country. That’s done automatically.
When you want to investigate or target somebody, a human becomes
involved.”
***
“The public doesn’t understand,” Landau told Mayer. “It’s much more intrusive than content.”
The National Security Agency says that the telephone metadata it collects on every American is essential for finding terrorists. And that’sdebatable. [Indeed, top counter-terrorism experts say that all of this spying doesn’t keep us safe , and that it actually hurts U.S. counter-terror efforts (more here and here).] But this we know for sure: Metadata is very useful for tracking journalists and discovering their sources. On Monday, a former FBI agent and bomb technician pleaded guilty
to leaking classified information to the Associated Press about a
successful CIA operation in Yemen. As it turns out, phone metadata was
the key to finding him. *** The real reason the government is going after leakers is because it
can. Investigators today have greater access to phone records and
e-mails than they did before Obama took office, allowing them to follow
digital data trails straight to the source. *** In a highly controversial move, investigators secretly obtained a subpoena for phone records of AP reporters and editors. *** Once investigators looked at that phone metadata, they got their big break in the case. *** It’s no wonder that the Obama administration is going after leakers
so often. Metadata is the closest thing to a smoking gun that they’re
likely to have, absent a wiretap or a copy of an email in which the
source is clearly seen giving a reporter classified information. *** If you’re looking for a case study in the power of metadata, you’ve found it.
The information collected on the AP [in the recent
scandal regarding the government spying on reporters] was telephony
metadata: precisely what the court order against Verizon shows is being
collected by the NSA on millions of Americans every day. *** Discussing the use of GPS data collected from mobile phones, an appellate court noted that
even location information on its own could reveal a person’s secrets:
“A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a
weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful
husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of
particular individuals or political groups,” it read, “and not just one
such fact about a person, but all such facts.”
Spying on Americans’ metadata rolls back everything our freedom of
association … and virtually everything the Founding Fathers fought for. Indeed, computer experts have used an analogy to explain how powerful
metadata is: the English monarchy could have stopped the Founding
Fathers in their tracks if they only possessed “metadata” regarding which colonist talked to whom.
Americans want NSA spying reined in. But a poll from November showed that only 11% of Americans trust Obama to actually do anything to rein in spying. We were right to be skeptical … Today, Obama announced his fake “reforms” … and he’s not doing anything but putting lipstick on the same ‘old pig. The New York Times notes that Obama’s “reform”:
Largely codifies existing practices.
The Times points out that the reform is meant to placate NSA critics, without actually challenging national security agencies:
The emerging approach, described by current and former
government officials who insisted on anonymity in advance of Mr. Obama’s
widely anticipated speech, suggested a president trying to straddle a
difficult line in hopes of placating foreign leaders and advocates of civil liberties without a backlash
from national security agencies. The result seems to be a speech that
leaves in place many current programs, but embraces the spirit of reform
and keeps the door open to changes later.
The Times includes a revealing quote:
“Is it cosmetic
or is there a real thumb on the scale in a different direction?” asked
one former government official who worked on intelligence issues.
“That’s the question.”
The answer should be obvious.
This is – once again – Obama saying “trust me” … without changing anything.
Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all US persons.
And Friday, NSA chief Keith Alexander wrote a letter to Senator
Bernie Sanders saying that the NSA cannot reveal whether the agency has
been targeting members of Congress in its metadata collection because
doing so would violate privacy provisions accorded to civilians in the
program:
The telephone metadata program incorporates extraordinary
controls to protect Americans’ privacy interests. Among those
protections is the condition that NSA can query the metadata only based
on phone numbers reasonably suspected to be associated with specific
foreign terrorist groups. For that reason, NSA cannot lawfully search
to determine if any records NSA has received under the program have
included metadata of the phone calls of any member of Congress, other
American elected officials, or any other American without that
predicate.
The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency
won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have
had their communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping
new counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so. That claim comes in a short letter sent Monday to civil libertarian
Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. The two members of the Senate’s
intelligence oversight committee asked the NSA a simple question last month: under the broad powers
granted in 2008′s expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, how many persons inside the United States have been spied upon by
the NSA? The query bounced around the intelligence bureaucracy until it
reached I. Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence, the nominal head of the 16 U.S.
spy agencies. In a letter acquired by Danger Room,
McCullough told the senators that the NSA inspector general “and NSA
leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself
violate the privacy of U.S. persons,” McCullough wrote.
In other words, the NSA is sending the same message to both the
American people and their representatives in Congress: f@ck off.
Now
you may better understand why we are undertaking the challenge of a
Constitutional Campaign for US Representative in Las Vegas District 1. Join the campaign for Constitutional Government with Justice, Life, Liberty, Peace and Prosperity now
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