Matt Blaze Examines Communications Privacy

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.'"

Indeed ...

[Skal Tura]

Indeed, metadata is a powerfull thing, very powerfull.

Infact, it's metadata which matters the most. An real world example of the power of metadata is Google. Basicly, the ranking works because of metadata, originating as metadata or derived from the content of the page.

Bad for innocent, neutral for guilty

[Techmeology]

This is just another example of something that penalises innocent people who just want to communicate, while barely hindering those who are up to genuine mischief. These bills are usually designed to counter terrorism. One fatal flaw: most terrorist organisations would have someone with the technological experience to find a way around such monitoring - like routing network traffic through servers in foreign countries, or using TOR.

Too late

[betterunixthanunix]

Just look at websites like Facebook and Myspace. You are basically telling those companies, through their website, who you are, who your friends are, where you like to hang out, etc. There is a rapidly decreasing margin of privacy for the government to encroach on; just quickly looking through someone's Facebook profile tells you who their friends are, and which of those friends they hang out with the most (based on which friends are most likely to appear in pictures with the target of interest). That's enough information to track down and capture a person, and nobody had to leave their office or interview anyone. The worst part? People are voluntarily giving this information to Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, and so forth.

The NSA program was and is illegal

[$beirdo]

The fact of the matter is that this NSA program was illegal. The Newsweek article suggests that several high-ranking members of the Justice Department were aware that the program was illegal, and did nothing to stop it.

Such a violation of the law represents a fundamental failure of our system of government to protect the rights of its citizenry. Because the Bush administration has willfully broken the law, the federal government no longer has the moral right or authority to govern the people of the United States.

Barack Obama needs to take drastic steps, including impeachment and prosecution of all those within the Bush administration who have broken the law, if he wishes to restore the validity and authority of the federal government.

Re:Too late

[e-scetic]

Hrm, not quite.

If I decide to disappear, none of my current friends and acquaintances would know where to find me. Facebook would be useless.

What the authorities would need to do is find all the long lost childhood friends and acquaintances from any one of the many places I used to live as a kid, assuming they would remember anything if found.

HOWEVER, having said that, I didn't grow up on Facebook, kids these days are different. With Facebook their childhoods are pretty much on record.

Makes me wonder if children should be prohibited from using Facebook, hrm.

Traffic analysis

[yali]

Why not extend this test to national-security information? I bet if you ask the military, CIA, NSA, etc. whether they would consider their own "meta-data" as less sensitive than the actual content of messages, they'd say no. The history of traffic analysis [wikipedia.org] in military and foreign-policy applications is a pretty good indication of that.