Matt Blaze Examines Communications Privacy 44
altjira writes "Matt Blaze analyzes the implications of a recent Newsweek story on the Bush administration's use of the NSA for domestic spying on communications, and questions whether the lower legal threshold for the collection of communications metadata is giving away too much to the government: 'As electronic communication pervades more of our daily lives, transaction records — metadata — can reveal quite a bit about us, indeed often much more than a few out-of-context conversations might. Aggregated into databases with other people's records (or perhaps everyone's records) and analyzed by powerful software, metadata by itself can paint a remarkably detailed picture of connections, relationships, and other patterns that could never be recovered simply from listening to the conversations themselves.'"
Not big boom; but, lotsa boom... (Score:5, Funny)
Personally, I try to work the words "bomb plan", "explosive" or "sulfuric acid as a catalyst" in all of my instant message conversations online. The poor analysis software must get lonely without stuff to find in most communications.
Of course a real anarchist bomb making skeptic might also include words like "tax dodge" or "after downing street" in their mail...