In the past few months, the National Security Agency and the Obama administration’s policies on data collection has been at the forefront of the news. Most of this debate has been centered on whether or not NSA ‘whistleblower’ Edward Snowden is a traitor or has, in fact, alerted the American people to an issue of real importance. Well two things have been missed in this ongoing debate. The first is whether or not American’s constitutional right to privacy has been violated. The second is what exactly is “metadata” and how invasive is its collection.
While there have been assertions from both the administration and the NSA that the content of your messages and phone calls were not being ‘thumbed through’, the implication that somehow recording metadata was far more benign didn’t seem to add up. With some cursory research, the findings seem to be far more troubling.
In short, metadata may leave out what exactly you are saying, but it tells whoever is watching you who exactly you’re talking to and for how long, who is around you while you do it and exactly where you are during your conversations. This appears to be far more invasive than reading a ‘Good morning, I love you’ text from your significant other.
Metadata can be succinctly summarized as all the signals which your cell phone emits, though not including the actual written or spoken content of your conversations. In essence, every time your phone does anything, from your alarm going off to you logging into Facebook, it checks and verifies its location off of nearby cell phone towers.
In short, this creates a detailed map of where you are and what you are doing. This means that someone or something somewhere is both recording whom you’re communicating with and logging your location with accuracy of a few meters.
For example, my morning would look something like this: 7:00 alarm- location my bedroom. 7:30 text message to girlfriend from parking lot. 7:33 text message received along I-95 from girlfriend. And so on and so forth.
Overseas this has not gone on without protest.
German politician Malte Spitz was so alarmed by the record of his personal “goings on” that he sued to have his metadata returned. Once he recovered the information he turned it into a map of his life in order to illustrate the power and capability of such information.
With the link above one can witness- in real time- a map of Malte’s day. His habits, trends and those he communicates with are clearly revealed, along with what coffee shops he likes to frequent and at what time. However, what is left off of this map is another aspect of metadata that has even greater potential for misuse or abuse at the ‘personal’ level.
Let’s say you have a friend who is researching Osama Bin Laden for a graduate school project.
He may have accidentally, or perhaps for the purposes of his research, visited a site linked to a ‘jihadist’ group. The both of you sit down for coffee in-between classes on Tuesday and Thursday not to talk about Bin Laden, which you know nothing about, but to talk about how the Baltimore Orioles won’t spend any money in the offseason, which is slowly turning the two of you into alcoholics.
But, under the current laws governing the NSA, his metadata suggests that he frequents Jihadist websites and is perhaps a Jihadist himself. You as a known associate, and as someone who shares consistent stretches of time with him are likely to have yourself under the same level of scrutiny.
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Think this is a stretch? Check out what happened when someone googled ‘backpacks’ and ‘pressure cookers’ from within the same household on Long Island.
To be clear, this is passive collection and isn’t necessarily actively monitored, it is more a necessity of having a cell phone. The providers use your position to determine how to provide you, the user, with the best possible reception possible so that you don’t jump to another carrier.
No one likes to have crappy reception, or that awesome ‘selfie’ might fail to upload onto Facebook.
However, this record does not simply exist for an instant, but is logged into a computer record and saved until consciously deleted.
For example, Police Departments have been using this to check alibis, or determine whether or not a suspect was in the same vicinity as a victim.
Prior to the development of metadata programs within the NSA, this needed to be obtained through a warrant. Even local police departments are now being provided with this data “warrant free” from the NSA.
With metadata at their fingertips, anyone in a position of authority can access you daily life and communications without ‘cause’ which at one point, was what the Constitution allowed through the appropriate methods within a court of law. And now once again, we have been told that this is ‘OK’. That you as an American citizen are not having your messages read, or your conversations listened to. Which is, in fact, true.
But, while they don’t necessarily choose to read that sappy text message to your significant other (however if they want to they can), they can immediately tell that you sent it at 9:13 AM; from the Starbucks on the 1100 block of Eutaw Street; while you were sitting next to Paul Spinelli; who remained there for 23 minutes and checked his Facebook three times before returning to his apartment two blocks away at 9:44.
This appears way more invasive than reading “I <3 u”, does it not?
On the individual level, the potential for the violation of privacy is disturbing. On the group level, it is far more so.
During the Soviet era, the Stassi and KGB had a primary task of rounding up political dissidents (those who had the audacity to speak out against the government). This was done mainly through the use of ‘snitches’ and individual interviews. According to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Stassi in particular would have gone to the ends of the earth to acquire a technological edge such as this.
After all, trailing dissidents takes a lot of manpower and I’m assuming is a pretty exhausting chore. With metadata as a tool for the KGB the Gulags of Soviet Russia would still undoubtedly be in place. As no dissent would have been possible to organize.
The frightening reach of such a capability in the wrong hands was evident in Ukraine in late January and was something straight out of an Orwell Novel. Ukraine had been undergoing months of protest against their government, when on January 22 all participants in one of the demonstrations received the following text message at roughly the same time:
“Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”
According to the above NYT piece on the matter, an individual within the protest didn’t send the message, nor did the cellular service provider. A higher ‘entity’, perhaps a government one, more than likely did.
Just like the rhetoric from the NSA and White House, the sender did not need to know that those gathered were texting. They did not need to listen to the communications of leadership in regards to planning such an action. All they had to do was determine the area where the protest was happening, then seize the numbers of those in the area and send over a nice ‘hello’.
As a minimum, such action undoubtedly intimidates those involved and will most likely dissuade some participants from going to the next ‘democratic’ rally. The long term ramifications undermine one of the fundamental principles of democracy – that is the right to protest peacefully and make your voice heard as a society.
Electronic surveillance on a level is an extremely valuable tool for protecting this nation. With appropriate targeting of those who seek to do us harm we can minimize the risk of something like another 9/11. However, for a government to record every message and to log every thought not only muddles its ability to focus on those who need focused on, but it alienates a nation that deserves protection in a correct and constitutional manner.
Latest posts by Jim Webb (see all)
- Mapping Out Metadata - February 21, 2014
[…] Good piece breaking down the particulars of the NSA stuff — just what they can access and how much a violation of privacy that actually is — but what I particularly like about this piece, and it’s something I’d like to see more people writing about, is the mention of how this kind of invasion of privacy is an absolute real threat to 1st amendment speech rights. You’re not free to speak when you’re worried someone may be listening. […]