-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal) Guest Blogger
On Friday, President Obama gave a speech concerning the collection of metadata by the NSA. Obama said “So, I want to be very clear—some of the hype that we’ve been hearing over the last day or so—nobody is listening to the content of people’s phone calls.” This is an example of the straw man fallacy. No reputable news reports have claimed that the content of phone calls is being listened to. We are well-informed enough to know that it is transactional data, metadata, that’s being collected. Obama also claimed that “the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls.” What Obama excludes is the collection of the user’s location from cell tower ID, antenna sector, and signal strength.
Obama also noted that the intelligence community is “not looking at people’s names.” However, an MIT study showed that with only four phone calls, a person could be uniquely identified from a collection of 1.5 million anonymous people. Your metadata identifies who you are by what you do.
With the collection of Metadata, the government can determine your political leanings (perhaps from the blogs you read), sexual orientation, medical issues, religious worship, and even marital infidelities. As an example of the latter, consider the David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell situation. They set up a shared, anonymous e-mail account. Instead of sending e-mails, they would communicate by logging in and editing and saving drafts. When Broadwell logged in from various hotels’ Wi-Fi hotspots, a trail of metadata, times and locations, was correlated with hotel guests by the FBI. Broadwell was easily identified.
Law professor Daniel Solove has likened metadata to a Seurat painting. Each dot is meaningless until one steps backs and an accurate picture emerges.
In Smith v. Maryland (1979), a 5-3 decision (J. Powell took no part), the collection of a phone number, using a pen register, by the police was held not to be a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. In the opinion of the Court:
Given a pen register’s limited capabilities, therefore, petitioner’s argument that its installation and use constituted a “search” necessarily rests upon a claim that he had a “legitimate expectation of privacy” regarding the numbers he dialed on his phone.
This claim must be rejected.
In his dissent, J. Marshall foresaw today’s problems:
The prospect of unregulated governmental monitoring will undoubtedly prove disturbing even to those with nothing illicit to hide. Many individuals, including members of unpopular political organizations or journalists with confidential sources, may legitimately wish to avoid disclosure of their personal contacts.
Mathematician Susan Landau, author of Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, is interviewed about the importance of metadata:
H/T: Elspeth Reeve, Juan Cole, Evan Perez and Siobhan Gorman, Jay Stanley and Ben Wizner, New York Times.
“I think some people are missing something here. The president has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life.”
“That’s going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before.”
“And whoever runs for president on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They’re going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can’t get around it. And he’s [President Obama] been very smart. It’s very powerful what he’s leaving in place.”
Maxine Waters
http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/democrat-raves-about-obamas-epic-database/
Seriously, the president claiming this is benign by declaring that the gov’t does not listen in on your phone calls is true strawman. The reality is David had mentioned is the metadata can often have more information than the content of the medium used.
One can look at a Microsoft Word document and see the metadata. Depending on versioning information the metadata can contain the following info
The username that create the file
The initials of the user’s name
The name of the computer where the doc was created
Location of the file, local or remote
the printer name and location on the network
File properties
Undo / corrections
Names of pervious document authors
Templates used
There was a big controversy about 8 years ago as to what was contained n metadata for word files. There often is more data than this in other formats.
My librarian cousin Sigma Smith sent this. She sums it up very well.
http://www.sagebrush.us/funny/phone-baby/
Relax people, President Obama is a very intelligent and the head of our country. He’s merely saying to us all, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.” Now..bend over and “squeal like a piggy.”
Good piece, Nal.
“No reputable news reports have claimed that the content of phone calls is being listened to.”
So, they are only reputable if they follow the military government line?
Which was “no, we don’t collect any data in dragnets like that” only a week ago.
Of course the military collect the content.
You think the military government is telling the truth when they speak or write on this issue?
bigfatmike,
Thanks for the link.
Excellent article, thank you for taking the time to put this together for us!
Nice article, nice reference – thanks.
Some readers might also be interested in this:
Today there is a pretty good summary of the many bits and pieces that have appeared in the popular press over the years regarding NSA monitoring capability.
The by-line is to the AP but you can read about it here in the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/06/15/us/politics/ap-us-nsa-surveillance.html?ref=news
Toward the end of the article there is an interesting quote:
“Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn’t really matter how Prism works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said. ”
It is my belief that for many years the popular press has provided enough information for any citizen to reach essentially the same conclusion that Schneier expresses – the government monitors much of everything that passes through electronic communications channels.
It seems clear to me that Snowden released classified information.
But the claims against Snowden go beyond the mere release of classified information.
The most damaging claim against Snowden is that he damaged national security by providing information that prompted our potential adversaries to change their communications techniques and procedures
It seems clear to me that any adversary sophisticated enough to read the popular press had to know that internet communications including email and social media, and telephone communications were likely being monitored by the US government.
And we believe the government why, again? Notice Obama did not produce any warrants for this collection, but rather complained about something that was not being alleged, which all but gives it away.
Secret program, secret court, zero oversight. To think data and metadata are not being freely examined is rather quaint.
Demand Congress make all communications secure to a person. The tech is here, and has been for some time. There is no reason for us to hand over our privacy carte blanche. There really isn’t. And those who demand it must be removed from office.
Good article…..
As I read some OS posted….. Don’t tell be what you believe…. Show me what you do and I’ll know what you believe….. Or something like that…
“Obama also noted that the intelligence community is “not looking at people’s names.” However, an MIT study showed that with only four phone calls, a person could be uniquely identified from a collection of 1.5 million anonymous people. Your metadata identifies who you are by what you do.”
“Not looking at peoples names”. Yeah…..right…..and J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t wiretapping MLK to find out damaging information. He was doing it to protect MLK.
“With the collection of Metadata, the government can determine your political leanings (perhaps from the blogs you read), sexual orientation, medical issues, religious worship, and even marital infidelities.”
To have such knowledge is in most cases to be able to exert control over individuals, or at the least to having a chilling affect on their associations and their activism. Is the President that naive that he is unaware of how this data can and will be used to intimidate individual citizens by government agents who feel entitled to do so in the name of some greater good? I think not. Terrorism is the red flag flown up to engender fear, thus acceptance. This information will also be used in purported criminal cases to force testimony and pleas bargains.
Yeah, Jeffery Toobin its not what you do when you cheat on your wife its what you say when you call some guy you don’t know a traitor. So do what you say and say what you do. Never tried a jury trial in your life, have you Toobin? Yet you say you are the CNN legal expert. Mommy was a news caster, daddy was too, went to Harvard and swim like one too. Don’t really know nuthin bout birthin babies tho.
No one is listening to your phone calls, trust me!!!
You have got to be kidding me. The fox, with bloody feathers hanging out of his mouth telling me the chickens are all okay inside.
HermanDog used to be guide dog for a guy who worked at CNN. That is where the inside scope on the CNN poopers is coming from.
Reblogged this on euzicasa.
I like to change their term from “metadata” to “megadata” as in too much of a dose. They just love their little term. It is nice and innocuous. Its not fried chicken mama its Shake n Bake. And the computer fuzzies don’t pronounce “data” as in date a person its dat a. So impersonal the data thing. So, metadata is just a lot of nothing. So don’t worry its just a collection of a whole lot of nothing. And we thus don’t know nuthin bout birthin babies Miz Scarlett. And yet we expect them to mid wife the downfall of al Qaeda. If it is all about a lot of nothing then why bother?
Rest assured Diane Feinstein that as you and your husband buy up all the closed Post Office buildings in the small towns of America and push your net assets over the One Hundred Million mark, that the rest of us are smarter than an 80 year old twit who listens to the likes of Clapper and claps him on the shoulder and says “Good job.” Then there is Saturday Night Al Franken who is satisfied that all is well. He even looks like a sheep. And then there is the legal expert on CNN who has never tried a jury trial but is their expert on all things legal including the Zimmerman trial. Toobin loves the idea that we are a nation of sheep and he can be the sheep herder. Send in the Clowns. It is well known around CNN that the staff makes fun of Jeffrey and that they play the song Watch Out For The Cheater by Bob Kuban and the Inmen. The staff sings the verses after he has passed in the hall. He hits on the college intern girls and tries to score. Year, the guy who calls Snowden a “traitor” cheats on his wife and understands full well the nature of the animal. So you have Toobin interviewing Clapper and the other schmucks and we learn that all they are doing is collecting metadata.
“Law professor Daniel Solove has likened metadata to a Seurat painting. Each dot is meaningless until one steps backs and an accurate picture emerges.”
From a data analysis standpoint, that is a perfect analogy.
Good job, David.
The straw-man argument is the haven of duplicitous. The tobacco industry used to do studies to prove that cigarettes did not cause all sorts of diseases that no one ever even suggested they did so that their adds could say that rigorous clinical studies prove that cigarette smoking does not cause hang nail!
There are a few cases in our history where the court has reversed itself. Dred Scott and separate but equal come to mind. Hopefully Smith v Maryland will one day be one of those cases.