{"id":9904,"date":"2015-07-10T07:01:32","date_gmt":"2015-07-10T12:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9904"},"modified":"2015-07-10T07:01:32","modified_gmt":"2015-07-10T12:01:32","slug":"spying-on-the-internet-is-orders-of-magnitude-more-invasive-than-phone-metadata","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9904","title":{"rendered":"Spying On the Internet is Orders of Magnitude More Invasive Than Phone Metadata"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Spying On the Internet is Orders of Magnitude More Invasive Than Phone Metadata<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"Featured<\/div>\n

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When you pick up the phone, who you\u2019re calling is none of the government\u2019s business. The NSA\u2019s domestic surveillance of phone metadata was the\u00a0first program to be disclosed<\/a>\u00a0based on documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Americans have been furious about it ever since. The courts\u00a0ruled it illegal<\/a>, and Congress let the section of the Patriot Act that justified it\u00a0expire<\/a>\u00a0(though the program lives on in a different form as part of the\u00a0USA Freedom Act<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Yet\u00a0XKEYSCORE<\/a>, the secret program that converts all the data it can see into searchable events like web pages loaded, files downloaded, forms submitted, emails and attachments sent, porn videos watched, TV shows streamed, and advertisements loaded, demonstrates how Internet traffic can be even more sensitive than phone calls. And\u00a0unlike the Patriot Act\u2019s\u00a0phone metadata program, Congress has\u00a0failed<\/a>\u00a0to limit the scope of programs like XKEYSCORE, which is presumably still operating at full speed.\u00a0Maybe Verizon stopped giving phone metadata to the NSA, but if a Verizon engineer uploads a spreadsheet full of this metadata without proper encryption, the NSA may well\u00a0get it anyway by\u00a0spying\u00a0directly on the cables that the spreadsheet travels over.<\/p>\n

The outrage over\u00a0bulk collection of our phone metadata makes sense:Metadata is private<\/a>. Americans call suicide prevention hotlines, HIV testing services, phone sex services, advocacy groups for gun rights and for abortion rights, and the people they\u2019re\u00a0having affairs with<\/a>. We use the phone to schedule job interviews without letting our current employer know, and to manage long-distance relationships. Most of us, at one point or another, have spent long hours on the phone discussing the most intimate details about our lives. There isn\u2019t an American alive today who\u00a0didn\u2019t grow up with at least some access to a telephone, so Americans understand this well.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spying On the Internet is Orders of Magnitude More Invasive Than Phone Metadata When you pick up the phone, who you\u2019re calling is none of the government\u2019s business. The NSA\u2019s domestic surveillance of phone metadata was the\u00a0first program to be disclosed\u00a0based on documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Americans have been furious about it ever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[249,577,7169,746,765,5567,1796,5380,4465],"class_list":["post-9904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-edward-snowden","tag-nsa","tag-phone-metadata","tag-spying","tag-surveillance","tag-the-intercept","tag-us-congress","tag-us-patriot-act","tag-xkeyscore"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9905,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9904\/revisions\/9905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}