Thursday 27 June 2013

Calling It 'Metadata' Doesn't Make Surveillance Less Intrusive

"This is just metadata. There is no content involved." That was how Sen. Dianne Feinstein defended the NSA's blanket surveillance of Americans' phone records and Internet activity. Before those revelations, not many people had heard of metadata, the term librarians and programmers use for the data that describes a particular document or record it's linked to. It's the data you find on a card in a library catalog, or the creation date and size of a file in a folder window. It's the penciled note on the back of a snapshot: "Kathleen and Ashley, Lake Charles, 1963." Or it could be the times, numbers and GPS locations attached to the calls in a phone log.

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