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The Truth About Metadata

By Jeralyn, Section Civil Liberties
Posted on Mon Jul 29, 2013 at 08:39:59 PM EST
Tags: NSA surveillance, metadata (all tags)
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The ACLU has a post today showing just how much metadata reveals about your life and associations.

Why this is important: In the attempt to justify the NSA surveillance program, the President and some in Congress resort to claims like "It's just metadata, not content."

"This is just metadata," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein assured the American people, referring to the NSA's bulk collection of Americans call records. "There is no content involved." President Obama and his national security officials have made similar assurances.

Using a program called Immersion, developed by MIT Media Lab, he reviews almost 9 years of his own emails. Immersion examines the From, To, Cc and Timestamp fields-- from a Gmail account and visualizes it.

[More...]

When visualized and analyzed over time, my data reveals my family members--who are all tightly grouped and linked together--and those people who I am, or was, closest to in each phase of my private and professional life. All of my various work colleagues are networked together as well as my many circles of friends, tethered together around high school, grad school, different work places, and even where I've lived. It's easy to tell which woman became my wife, when we met, and how our relationship grew stronger over time. By using Immersion's time scroll, I can go back in time, find my wife, and watch as her speck balloons into the biggest orb in my interconnected sea of circles.

The data visualization also shows potential discord over time, such as friends who have either become acquaintances or even possibly enemies.

The reality is metadata can provide the Government with much more information about you than content. Bottom line:

Metadata, no matter what the detractors say, collected over time is an intimate repository of our lives--whom we love, whom we're friends with, where we work, where we worship (or don't), and whom we associate with politically. The right to privacy means our metadata shouldn't be collected and analyzed without reasonable suspicion that we've done something wrong.

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    Exactly right (5.00 / 2) (#1)
    by ruffian on Mon Jul 29, 2013 at 08:55:52 PM EST
    I think of how many of my calls, IMs and emails are solely for the purpose of making a connection, or establishing whereabouts. The content is nearly meaningless half the time.

    The content is nearly meaningless... (5.00 / 1) (#5)
    by unitron on Tue Jul 30, 2013 at 04:11:09 AM EST
    ...but as they say, context is everything.

    Parent
    One of the other truths about metadata (5.00 / 2) (#12)
    by Anne on Tue Jul 30, 2013 at 10:00:24 AM EST
    is that a lot of companies and firms are already dealing with metadata issues: documents of all kinds, delivered electronically, can be a treasure trove of data that isn't obvious from the document itself.  

    Little did people know that the recipient of the document could gain access to anything more than what they could see if they printed it out.  But you can get access to things like who worked on the document, who else it was sent to, the changes that were made to it, hidden notes and comments - and much, much more.  You can only imagine how damaging that could be in litigation - the term "smoking gun" comes to mind.

    My firm has a metadata cleaning program that removes all of that kind of information, and we are strongly urged to use it when sending anything electronically.

    Yep (5.00 / 1) (#13)
    by jbindc on Tue Jul 30, 2013 at 10:24:42 AM EST
    As I said before - I do this for a living.

    I review documents in preparation for litigation, and we look at things like the Viewer view, the Native view, and the Extracted Text view.  We check the metadata - and oddly enough, for the same document, they don't necessarily have the same exact information.

    This has been a big deal for lawyers, so THEY don't disclose metadata, but potential litigants should know that metadata IS discoverable information.

    Consequently, metadata is becoming an increasingly important part of electronic discovery. Recent changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure make metadata routinely discoverable as part of civil litigation. Parties to litigation are required to maintain and produce metadata as part of discovery, and spoliation of metadata can lead to sanctions. They may negotiate to exclude metadata from produced documents in the obligatory meet and confer under the new rules, but without an agreement to that effect, the parties must produce the metadata.


    Parent
    What is the program? (none / 0) (#35)
    by republicratitarian on Wed Jul 31, 2013 at 08:02:16 PM EST
    Or can you say?

    Parent
    The True Truth About Metadata (5.00 / 2) (#14)
    by Edger on Tue Jul 30, 2013 at 10:32:40 AM EST
    Around the mediascape, we hear a lot of talk about Edward Snowden being a criminal, and needing to return home to face "justice." But what about the possibility that people like Snowden actually are the forces of justice, while the criminals are the ones in charge of the system?

    Not criminals, you say? How about creating or exacerbating "security threats," then cruelly panicking the public into approving increasingly intrusive measures to bolster security? Isn't that something like mobsters who throw a brick through a store window, then offer to provide "protection" against future brick-throwers?
    [...snip...]
    The protectors, having created a vast, self-perpetuating bureaucracy, are not really protecting us so much as they are protecting themselves, their paychecks, their own power.
    [...snip...]
    -Spying on us is big business. We're so stupid that we actually pay our tax dollars to have the surveillance contracted out to private companies that are getting rich off of sticking their noses in our business. Fully 60 percent of "intelligence" work is now subcontracted to the "private sector."  Do you have any idea where all that money goes or what it buys? I don't. And neither, based on reports of massive waste, corruption and incompetence, do the "insiders."
    [...snip...]
    Perhaps we get what we deserve. But perhaps we can change that equation.

    If people can get all worked up about fictional horror stories on Netflix, maybe they can be made to care about the Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue, Reality Version.