Phone Records Program Declassified After Outcry

As technology advances, the distinction between data and metadata can be hard to distinguish. If a Website’s content is data, is the Website’s address metadata? The government has argued it is.
But like the list of books we check out of a library, the sites we “visit” online are really a list of things we’ve read. Not only do URLs often contain content – such as search terms embedded within them – but the very fact that we’ve visited a page with a URL such as “www.webmd.com/depression” can be every bit as revealing as the content of an email message.

For this reason, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have long appreciated the value of metadata, and the outdated view that metadata surveillance is far less invasive than eavesdropping has allowed those agencies to use powerful surveillance tools with relatively little judicial oversight.
They can do this because, decades ago, long before the Internet altered

all aspects of modern communication, the Supreme Court ruled that when we voluntarily divulge personal information to any third party, we waive our privacy rights and lose all Fourth Amendment protection over that information.

That decision would make sense if it was about, for example, why we can’t reasonably expect something to remain private when we loudly boast about it in a bar.  But the court extended that logic to phone calls. The argument was that since we “share” the phone numbers we dial with the phone company – which needs that information to connect the call – we can’t claim any constitutional protection when the government asks for that data.

After the Supreme Court took this wrong turn in the 1970s, Congress compounded in the 1980s by codifying a lesser standard of protection for metadata. But neither the court nor Congress could have foreseen that NSA supercomputers would one day be able to mine that metadata to construct comprehensive pictures of our lives.

So we shouldn’t be comforted when government officials reassure us that they’re not listening to our communications – they’re merely harvesting and mining our metadata.  In a digital world, metadata can be used to construct nuanced portraits of our social relationships and interactions.

It’s long past time for Congress to update our surveillance and privacy laws to ensure that before the government can go digging through our digital lives, it needs to demonstrate to a judge that it has good reason to believe we’ve done something wrong.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost