Fox News:
The government doesn’t need to listen to your phone calls to learn massive amounts of highly personal information about you.
Americans are still buzzing about the revelation last week that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) uses a formerly top-secret program called PRISM to gather huge amounts of data from Web communication services like Google, Facebook and Skype.
It’s almost enough to make people forget that just hours before, The Guardian broke the story that the NSA also gathers metadata “indiscriminately and in bulk” from customers of telecommunications provider Verizon.
Metadata refers to the circumstantial information that can be gleaned from a message aside from the message’s content. So, for example, the NSA might not be listening in on Verizon customers’ calls, but they do know how many calls you make, the cell tower that you connect to (which reveals your general location), the time and length of your calls and the cell numbers, and the SIM card info of the people you call.
U.S. privacy laws make a distinction between metadata and communications, so even though the government supposedly needs a warrant to collect the latter (though, despite those privacy laws, the PRISM program collects communication information without a warrant), it doesn’t necessarily need one to obtain metadata.
Technically, “metadata” has always been a reality of communication. But until the dawn of the Technology Age, the metadata surrounding communication was relatively limited.
Landline phone calls and emails provide substantially more metadata, but in the last five years, the amount of metadata generated by mobile phones has increased exponentially — in fact, too fast for the legal system to properly regulate and protect it.
It makes you wonder, what kind of metadata will communications include five years from now?
“The types and quality of metadata will absolutely continue to increase, in ways we haven’t thought of yet,” said Rebecca Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a California-based nonprofit advocate for digital rights based in California. “Our digital trails get wider and wider every day.”
