New York Magazine explains:
“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.’”
“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.”
...
Nevertheless, they want the content of your phone calls, and emails, and text messages, and facebook posts, and tweets, and ...
In the face of the absolutely staggering amount of data generated just by phone companies for the purpose of computing telephone service billings, our best computer technology is about as useful as a stone hatchet ~ sure, eventually it'll get there, but it'll really be messy.
At this point in time nobody is matching everybody up with everybody else to see who is doing what with which.
LOL Mark Levin is reading your article right now. Went right from the zerohedge article to your NY Mag comment
Virtually everything that communicates with or by computer creates metadata. My digital camera creates metadata, my meter reader says my digital meter communicates with his handheld recorder with metadata.
American government doesn’t exist to ‘keep us safe’, but to keep our liberty safe. That’s a big difference.
So you wouldn't even need to be making phone calls and they could tell approximately where you (or technically your cell phone) were at any given time.
They know that I have problems with my credit cards because of all the calls I get from “Rachel” of “Card Services” who promises to lower my interest rate.
Bttt.
bkmk
Deb Roy - of MIT, this video starts out showing how he wired his house with video cameras. Data and images were tracked and saved.
This is eye opening as to what a DATA tracking landscape looks like, and is just a glimpse of how “we” are being tracked through social media.
http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html
the phone number's connected to the email,
the email's connected to the websites,
the websites are connected to the data,
the data is your personal life.
I wonder how long it will take for lawyers to begin to supoena e-mails, skype, text-messages, and messages or any other thing which could be used in a court of law to fight any legal proceeding. For example if 2 drug dealers are talking on skype and one gets caught, then turns states evidence to reduce a sentence, it might exhonerate someone who says they were not part of the deal. So they suppoena the documents and it seems each party has a right to a vigorous defense.
Obama and his ‘metadata’ have just killed their beloved social media. Anyone who stays on it now is a fool.
Without the key to the code, the other side could not translate the first three sets of numbers into the second set of numbers, and without the code book it could not look up the meaning of the second of numbers as "next transmission noon."
But the other side could, with hard, meticulous work, deduce that an Infantry Division HQ, a field hospital, and an Armored Regiment HQ, all have different, and unique, patterns of radio traffic, based on the amount of radio traffic, the number of sub-units (if any) that acknowledged receiving the radio traffic, and the like.
When an Infantry Division and an Armored Regiment held in reserve suddenly started chatting with a Corp. HQ, and stopped talking to the Army HQ that reserve units spoke to, it was very clear that those two units were now assigned to the Corp. HQ, and were moving up to the front. That could be deduced even if absolutely none of the contents of the messages could be read. And it could be deduced by tired human brains, with limited understanding of the other side's radio traffic.
Just think about the relationships a super computer with perfect knowledge of time and place and other parties with whom you have made and received every call, text and email, for a period of years, will be able to deduce.