Dahlia Lithwick and Steve Vladeck write: This week brought a new round of revelations about yet another National Security Agency surveillance program, this one created to hoover up details about how individual Americans use the Internet. The new disclosures were met by most observers with a fatalistic shrug. After all, we’ve quickly grown accustomed — or at least desensitized — to the fact that the government is looking at much of the information we voluntarily provide to others. And the material being collected in this case was only “metadata”: the details of when, where, and how we used the Internet — not what we actually read or wrote.
Should NSA sweeps of our “to” and “from” lines be fair game? How much can the government really learn about us without knowing what we’re saying in the text?
The legality of the “telephony metadata” program — the initiative revealed by Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian in June that showed the government collecting telephone records of Americans on a mass scale — will be considered by a federal district judge in Manhattan on Friday. According to the now disclosed orders of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, such “metadata” includes “the originating and terminating telephone number and the time and duration of any call.” It also includes information about the location of both parties to the call and the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) and international mobile station equipment identity (IMEI) numbers, which allow Uncle Sam to “identify the user or device that is making or receiving a call.” But because it doesn’t include the content of the phone calls, the story goes, there’s no invasion of our privacy. Nothing, therefore, to worry about?
As Professor Edward Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, explains in a declaration filed in that phone records case, our metadata in fact tells the government a lot more about us than we might realize, especially when different types of metadata are aggregated together. Consider calls to single-purpose hotlines: NSA collection of our metadata means the government knows when we’ve called a rape hotline, a domestic violence hotline, an addiction hotline, or a support line for gay teens. Hotlines for whistleblowers in every agency are fair game, as are police hotlines for “anonymous” reports of crimes. Charities that make it possible to text a donation to a particular cause (say, Planned Parenthood) or political candidate or super PAC could reveal an enormous amount about our political activities. And calling patterns can reveal our religious beliefs (no calls on Sabbath? Heaps of calls on Christmas?) or new medical conditions. If, for instance, the government knows that, within an hour, we called an HIV testing service, then our doctor, and then our health insurance company, they may not “know” what was discussed, but anyone with common sense — even a government official — could probably figure it out. [Continue reading…]
