[governance] FW: [Dewayne-Net] "Metadata" Can Tell the Government More About You Than the Content of Your Phonecalls

[McTim]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 10:58 AM, Roland Perry
<roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:
> In message <1b8e01ce682a$0b86c5a0$229450e0$@gmail.com>, at 07:34:51 on Thu,
> 13 Jun 2013, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> writes
>
>> The government has sought to "reassure" us that it is only tracking
>> "metadata" such as the time and place of the calls, and not the actual
>> content of the calls.
>>
>> But technology experts say that "metadata" can be more revealing than the
>> content of your actual phone calls.
>
>
> This is as unsurprising a revelation as the defecation habits of bears.
>
> It's been recognised in UK surveillance law for over a decade now, with the
> acknowledgement that while you can't fail to identify which website someone
> went to (as traffic data) ISPs should not identify which page of the website
> was accessed. [I helped draft the paragraph concerned, maybe the first time
> a justice department minister has hosted a meeting for someone clutching an
> rfc].
>
> So, for example, the authorities could tell (by making appropriate requests)
> that I went to a garden shop's website, but aren't supposed to be told if I
> looked at fertilizer (some of which can be used to make bombs) or geraniums
> (which can't).
>
> This (the restriction) might be of more practical importance if I went to a
> search engine site, where the results of the search should be out of bounds,
> but not any subsequent access of a site (and just the site, not the page)
> the search engine found.


on a related note, this useful article in the Economist:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/m2eghts


-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel

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