About All That Data Mining

And the government/industrial complex in general, a clip from the 19997 film Good Will Hunting:

The president has dismissed it all as "hype":

"When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program's about," Obama said. "As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at peoples' names and they're not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism."

Ah, yes -- the "may" identify folk who "might" engage in terrorism. How reassuring.

About that metadata that doesn't really tell the government any of your secrets, via Digby, this article from The Atlantic, with some real eye-openers:

The answer, according to the mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas Drake and who is also the author of “Surveillance or Security?,” is that it’s worse than many might think.

“The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content.”

For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: “You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.” And information from cell-phone towers can reveal the caller’s location. Metadata, she pointed out, can be so revelatory about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive stories that it can make more traditional tools in leak investigations, like search warrants and subpoenas, look quaint. “You can see the sources,” she said. When the F.B.I. obtains such records from news agencies, the Attorney General is required to sign off on each invasion of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up millions of records a minute, it’s unclear if any such brakes are applied.

Read the whole article -- it gets worse.

It occurs to me that it's maybe slightly more difficult than a total no-brainer to set up systems that are going to correlate certain batches of metadata to show the patterns that Landau is talking about -- Google and Amazon do it all the time. (See this bit from TPM about a company that actually does this. Although they're denying any government connection, even though their first client was the CIA.) Do you really want something like this being run by people who operate in secret, under the auspices of judges who meet in secret and whose decisions are secret, all for something as vague as "national security"? And tell me, who's going to insure our security from programs like this?

And do we dare ask who has access to this information?

Things like this are probably a major reason that I'm into total escapism these days.