Chris Blattman

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“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 “metadata”—who 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.

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’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s 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, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” 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’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

That is David Cole beginning his NYRB review of the USA Freedom Act, a bill passed May 22 to rein in NSA spying on Americans (a little).

The basic message is that a decent bill was watered down to accomplish only a little. But ‘a little’ is a decent start.

I feared worse. When something is called the ‘Freedom Act’, you’d be wise to guess it’s taking freedom away. Sort of like when a country has the word “Democratic” in its official name– the first sign it’s a fascist tyranny. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you don’t usually need a flashing sign that reads “DUCK”.

26 Responses

  1. Why did you phone Mr Bombs last night. Oh, you dialled a wrong number. Fine. So sorry for troubling you. Have a nice day.

    USA forget too quickly. The world, sorry to say, is not as they think it is.

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