proximity1

The focus here is rife with confusion. First, « aggregation » is a misnomer and misleading, as it seems to suggest some sort of activity which is distinct from the term « seizure » which we find in the Fourth Amendment's phrase « The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated », and, as « aggregation » is used here it's presented devoid of any qualifying adjective, as though « aggregation » is presumptively a neutral activity. This approach misdirects our attention, focusing on an activity stripped of the vital context which the Fourth Amendment addresses . The importance of the Fourth Amendment relates to several things, all of which concern the stated purpose of the Amendment --to ensure people's right to be « secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects » --those concern « who may conduct searches and seizures », and « how and under what conditions and circumstances ». Therefore, central to the point is that it is, FIRST, the police or state « security » authorities which are doing the seizure---the « aggregation », and not the fact that the photos were originally made « innocently ». To fail to recognize the key factor of who is collecting, is to proceed upon the naive assumption that what was first innocently produced by the acts of numerous private individuals, retains its innocent character even when, « aggregated », seized first, then aggregated and finally indexed and stored for further analysis and comparison. SECOND, in order to vindicate the meaning and purpose of the Fourth Amendment, it would seem that any long-term stockage of data gained from searches and seizures, beyond what is necessary for the use as evidence which first occasioned the search and seizure, is inherently « unreasonable ». When the Fourth Amendment was drafted, the fruits of searches and seizures were material—and, in general, when the search and seizure did not produce any actionable ground for prosecution, the materials were restored to their owner(s). The idea that the government could and should keep original or copies and file them away permanently or indefinitely beyond the time of the immediate purposes for which they were seized would have been viewed as both absurd and outrageously contrary to any notion of « reasonable » seizure. Similarly, even long afterphotography had become commonplace, people going about their business in public places took little notice of whether and how they might becaptured in the focal lens of a photograper's camera. That is because there existed no means for cameras and other tracking devicesto keep them under complete and constant surveillance wherever they went outside of their homes. Thus, that there was no reasonableexpectation of privacy in the public square is simply a feature of a now-outdated mode of life, that in which being out in public presented no automatic and constant liability that one's movements be tracked and recorded and stored permanently for any and all conceivable and secret future use. It is impliedly proposed here that this revolution in the capacity for surveillance, data seizure,collection, analysis and stockage is to be accepted matter-of-factly for the way it devastates the singificance of the meaning and theintentions behind the Fourth Amendment. It is proposed here that « reasonable » must depend on what the most invasive technology leaves less than completely compromised in its privacy and confidentiality. It is proposed here that we take a view of ourprivacy rights as « reasonable expectations » which leaves them as an appendage to technology's (and the political powerrelations behind it) imperatives. In order to do that, we are apparently supposed to take these words, « The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. » and read and interpret them in a naive and superficial way, stripped of the historical and political context in which they were devised, proposed, debated and adopted, as a safeguard of an essential right to privacy against the extension of the power of authority beyond a limit implied by the respect for that right to privacy. Intimately involved in such a lighter-than-air suspension of the context of reality is the very notion itself of "meta"-data. The Fourth Amendment is not concerned with the supposed "nature" ("meta" or non-"meta") of the data or the prodcuts of the "persons, houses, papers, and effects" seized but rather with whether or not the acts of search and seizure themselves are lawfully reasonable, and leave intact a "right to be secure from what is unreasonable".

The condition is material to a discussion of the validity of authorities' acts concerning the photo images, even before getting to whether those pictured in them have a reasonable expectation of privacy. You've set up a scenario and offered it as a thought-experiment/example, in order, I gather, to make some point. But in doing that, you've left out of your fact set vital details--which I've asked for in order to give a properly-informed reply. To me, it makes all the difference in the world if the lunatic refers to an individual that the authorities in the scenario have obtained reasoned grounds to believe exists, or, on the other hand, is simply a completely hypothetical entity for which there is no actual living referent in the context of the scenario, of course. My answer might, yes, turn on or be influenced by this information. I've asked you to "draw a clearer picture for us" in order to be able to offer a useful answer.

In as much as you're open to discussing this aspect, I conclude, as a general observation here, that you tend to seek to micro-manage discussion, determining what is or is not germaine as you happen to see it, and rejecting as out of bounds others' views of that same where they conflict with yours. Also, I note that you mockingly mischaracterize what I have done in my comments above as an attempt to "analyze what I (i.e. what you) didn't say and draw a conclusion from it" -- when what I actually did was to point out what you make a point of refusing to take into consideration, matters that you classify as not germaine. That, of course, is directly addressing what are quite arguably reasonably pertinent aspects of the thread while your example, "I made no statement condemning rape" is a both a sarcastic comment and, at the same time, the reiteration of your assertions on what is or isn't "the topic of the conversation" --a direct example--and the most recent--of my claim here that you seek to micro-manage discussion by narrowing, and excluding what does not suit you. Your long experience here and your role as a staff/moderator offers you a privileged insight into how to achieve those ends while remaining inside what you know to be the de facto operating habits of the staff. With that, I won't address my comments directly to you as far as my further participation in this thread is concerned and, instead, will only address you when, as here, you directly pose questions to me, with the hope that this helps make the discussion less antagonistic. Specifically, I'll ignore from here on any comments you address to me which strike me as gratuitously hostile or provocative. If you take a similar disengaged stance, I'll see that as an act of mutual cooperation which I'll welcome and appreciate.

William Binney interviewed a year ago, April, 2012--- former technical director of the NSA’s "World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group" in a video interview about his experiences concerning the N.S.A.'s abuses of its surveillance capabilities and its invasions of privacy. This is one of a five-part series of reports including interviews with film-maker Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum, William Binney (on e-mail surveillance) and (Part Two) More Secrets... . At their respective web-pages, the video files are accompanied by written transcripts of the program. (From the website FindLaw.com) US Code - Chapter 119: Wire and electronic communications interception and interception of oral communications Federation of American Scientists' (FAS) "FISA webpage" (an updated page of references concerning The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 ) EPIC.ORG 's (Electronic Privacy Information Center) FISA webpage (updated references and related news)

In your scenario above, you posit that the reader "and a bunch of other people are out on a crowded street at some big event, and some lunatic (or lunatics) may have planted a bomb which could kill a few people and injure dozens of others," ---since you're the author of this exercise in thought-experiment, I ask, how are we to understand "some lunatic (or lunatics) may have planted a bomb"? Is that just offered as a possibility in the most strict and theoretical sense or are we supposed to imagine that there actually exists some present reason to suspect that some particular lunatic is involved? IOW, how is your picture being drawn here? Is it more than the fact that, at any given public event, and at any given place or time of such an event, we may always speculate that "some lunatic (or lunatics) may have planted a bomb" ? Are we supposed to imagine that in this scenario there is an actual lunatic and an actual bomb or just the hypothetical possibility of there being one? And, then, who, if anyone, (besides the presumed or hypothetical lunatic) has knowledge of these facts? And how are they suppposed to have come by that knowledge? For the C.I.A. and N.S.A., there are always potential lunatics planting potential bombs, which threaten potential injury and loss of life. And, to counter this, everyone, everywhere, is always under as much surveillance as the current technology permits. That is the "fishing expedition" theory of (known or unknown) searches and seizures of data--"someone somewhere is certainly engaged in the planning or perpetration of a crime. We have to find them and arrest them before the crime is committed ---and, indeed, before any reasonable indication of it is apparent. So, we take as our suspect class: Everyone, everywhere, all the time, and we simply look for anything which we can identify as potentially indicating a ground for suspicion. That is a police state.

Exactly. And, like you, this is what counts most for me. For Swansont, however, these don't come under the scope of his discussion interests here. And, if you suggest that this seems to indicate that, for him, the points you underline above are merely "incidental facts," he's free to object: "I never said that!" Right. He never said that. But the way he decides he likes the discussion's limits to be drawn suggests that he thinks that. I accept that the Verizon FISA court order in and of itself does not require of the telephone company to produce actual records of the customers' conversations. And I accept that, as defined under the terms of 18 U.S.C.§8, "metadata" does not include the substance of the telephone conversations. And, for Swansont, (@ N° 7) "These aren't wiretaps. They aren't (present tense*) listening in on conversations, they are collecting phone numbers, call lengths, and other data," (which I grant) and, (@ N° 12) "Further, if my phone company is already recording my land-line conversations, then that's a huge problem because AFAIK it's illegal, regardless of whether they turn it over to the feds. (though I don't think cell conversations are protected under a reasonable expectation of privacy)." NOTE: ((*) my own emphasis added and notation "present tense," just above) If Verizon company records his (land-line) phone conversations, "that's a huge problem...regardless of whether they turn it over to the feds." But, he's not concerned here about whether the N.S.A, based on its own theories of what the collected and analyzed metadata may seem to indicate to analysts, is led to target and record his or someone else's phone conversations. Whether that is also a huge problem or not is not something that he's interested to discuss here--and, from post N° 7, it seems that he finds others' interest in including that in the discussion something that is out of place. So, in answer to his, "Is that a sufficiently detailed explanation?" yes, it is. And, as for, ..."at this point I have no interest in discussing it with you," I'm not surprised.

The whole point here is just that--- no "court order", neither the Verizon instance or any other is, according to Snowden's explanation, a limiting factor on what an analyst with "access to query raw SIGINT databases" can do, with that access, to data, ANY data, that the agencies obtain, however they obtain it--via a "court order" or not. You're fixed on refusing to recognize the import of this, as though, simply because a "court order" was at some point sought, therefore, that fact means, apparently to you, that the use or abuse of the data within the scope of the order, doesn't get the same treatment as any other data can and does get. How is that? That is what I'm asking you to explain to us.

So, Mr. Snowden, speaking from direct personal experience on the matter, says that he had the capacity for direct, warrantless wiretapping, and that, even by formal rules of practice, warrants weren't even a "speed-bump" -- Viz: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa-files-whistleblower and Snowden's comments, above, you tell us, relate to "... all NSA activities," ... and, somehow, we're supposed to imagine that there is a distinction between "all NSA (surveillance) --for that's what's being referred to, surveillance-- activities, on the one hand, and, on the other,'the Verizon court order' ? You mean you grant that in general, regarding "all (surveillance) activities," the technicians had direct access to content, but that somehow this didn't and doesn't also include the matter specified as part of the "Verizon court order"? Why should anyone suppose that is the case, given Snowden's public statements? Care to explain that to us?

> 49: "Do that. Ask them what they meant by "outside information" and if they could get the name from the tracking data." I sent a request via e-mail to the study's designated author-for-replies-to-queries, with this question and a request for permission to quote his answer. At this writing I have not seen a reply to that. More later if I learn anything on it.

In RE: Post 3, of this thread : (Swansont) "These aren't wiretaps. They aren't listening in on conversations, they are collecting phone numbers, call lengths, and other data. Not that this is acceptable, but let's make sure we're discussion the correct scenario." ( Note also, Cap'n Refsmmat's post below. : " Q: When you say "someone at NSA still has the content of your communications" - what do you mean? ..." & etc.

> 40: "The items delineated in the court order, which specifically do not include the person't name, address, financial information nor the content of the call. In the context of the 4th amendment, as in a reasonable expectation of privacy." __________________________ Swansont replies: “In the context of the 4th amendment, as in a reasonable expectation of privacy.” So, the practical up-shot, which now should be rather obvious, is that the Fourth Amendment, by your view of things, is constantly at the mercy of an ever-changing and, in our times, certainly, ever-diminishing “reasonable expectation of privacy” such that, as technological evolution makes greater and greater intrusions on what it is possible to keep private, secret, from anyone technologically powerful enough to reach and inspect, especially, in a digitally-networked age, reach and inspect by secret and remote means, ETA: thus the meaning of "reasonable expectation of privacy" inexorably shrinks--and, I don't see how an expectation, once reduced, once "lost", is recoverable later as long as technology "thwarts" its "reasonableness"--as, of course, you define that, since I have yet to see you concede that anyone else's notion of reasonable is admissable here. Any example of that? Since a person is susceptible to remote direct or indirect observation—those from cell-tower relay transmitters which detect and log a cell phone’s nearest relay point, to trackers of page-views on any connection to the internet, whether the person connected takes any direct and overt act to “publish” his or her publicly-viewable “opinion” or not—even at home, no one escapes the potential surveillance unless he or she effectively disconnects from any and all “grid-points”: turn off the cell phone (and remove the battery, too?), close the computer connection—which means, if you are on a live-cable connection, you have to not only power-down, but disconnect the physical cable since many operations are possible without a so-called active log-on. Whenever the cable is connected, just as with a television set’s cable connection, the “service-provider” remains constantly, continuously abreast of the television’s state from its “sleep-mode” sensing capacity; so the cable signals when the set is “off,” or “on,” and all operations which occur, whether by an actual present viewer or a programmed direction for recording in the viewer’s absences. So, even while at home, and especially anywhere outside the home, no one ever has a complete “expectation of privacy” from the potential or actual snooping capacities of technology. It thus becomes conceivable to reduce Fourth Amendment rights to a nullity, a meaningless cipher. Thus we have the real-world implications of your view. Our right to privacy is a function of what we may, in your view, apparently, “reasonably expect” a concept which is under relentless open attack from the technology on the immediate horizon. I gather, too, that your view may also include that no private (LOL!) invidual should ever have an effective, that is, unilateral capacity for secrecy in one's behavior which is beyond officialdom's power to survey or somehow supervise. __________________________ "What else except "knowing who the person is" does "uniquely identify 95% of the individuals" mean?" RE: "AFAICT it means if you tagged that person with some label, like "subject A", you have a 95% confidence that you keep track of him or her and not get the subject mixed up with someone else.. But you don't know who the person is without additional information. Just like it says in what you quoted. Read the text again: (abstract): "We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the 1/10 power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals." According to your asserted interpretation, the text in bold above is simply nonsense, since "individuals" as you interpret it, never means people whose actual real-life identities are either known or knowable necessarily to the researchers (or anyone else in their comparable circumstances). In that interpretation, why do the authors write that "even coarse datasets "provide little anonymity"? As I read your interpretation, at no point in the course of the study is the anonymity of these individuals' ever breached, compromised, or lost. And, again, according to that "reasoning", the authors' writing that ..."These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy" is also nonsense. How do you account for that? It seems to me you're embarked on what amounts to desperate rationalizing which, as you proceed, becomes more and more ridciculous. It occurs to me that a simple and direct course is to simply ask one of the research team whether your interpretation is correct.

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/75456-nsa-found-to-be-collecting-details-on-all-phone-calls-in-the-united-states/page-4#entry749922 > 77 : ... "As I've been trying to explain, it provides the same privacy: the content of the discussion."... Michael McConnell does not agree with this view of yours--'the content of the discussion". And who is Michael McConnell? As the article cited above states, at the time of the article, May, 2007, McConnell was the Bush administration's Director of National Intelligence. And today? Mr. McConnell is "now vice chairman at Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden's former employer" So, the V.C. of Booz Allen Hamilton is on record as believing that, should the President so decide, he (PotUS) "had the authority under Article II of the Constitution to once again order the N.S.A. to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants." ____________ excerpts from testimony: (emphasis added except where otherwise indicated)

@ 2 I appreciate your trying to offer a reply. It seems to me both from your comments and from simple observation that the issues involved aren't clearly delineated. Instead, things are taken up and, if a determination is made, it's done in an ad hoc manner. This of course allows a good deal of ambiguity to develop in the practice of both moderation and in the way that some approach their own threads---as there isn't any clear, consistent principle--that is evident, at any rate, to those who are not privy to the moderator/staff discussions & decisions---which permits the general participant to understand in advance what comes within a thread's purview and how that is decided. E.G., you write: "The OP you refer to was, IMO, clearly asking a theoretical question regarding the privacy of metadata absent a discussion of the Edward Snowden case." (emphasis added) and, @ 30 ( in "Is metadata private?") : "This thread is very much aimed at an almost procedural debate on the privacy of metadata." (my emphasis added) Neither of these was clear to me and I cannot help but wonder how, for example, you actually arrived at the view you state in post 30, cited above. Where and what in the thread itself makes (and made) that clear? ETA: Was it in directly asking for clarification from Swansont himself, off-thread, that you gained this view of his thread's point and purpose? It seems to me that "Overtone" hadn't discerned that (as you see and as you saw it) any more than I had. There's something else: "The OP you refer to was, IMO, clearly asking a theoretical question regarding the privacy of metadata absent a discussion of the Edward Snowden case" what is it that is supposed to tip us off to the fact that, here, whether the topic is on "theory" or "practice" or both, we're supposed to have appreciated that practical examples, bearing on the issue's theoretical considerations, aren't welcome or germaine? Are we to suppose that in general here, when a topic addresses what seems to be a "theoretical matter", that practical aspects drawn from life and current experience are automatically to be deemed not proper in the discussion? You offer a start in answering my questions, but you leave the crux of them in a state of limbo, without any clear guidance. Consequently, I don't think that I'm now any more likely to correctly interpret what's permissable and when and where and why it is so than I was before I read your reply.

To promote the discussion of issues of privacy--especially as concerns privacy in the use of digitally-networked communications media--and to provide readers with referernces and links to sites and organizations which present information on these issues, this thread is dedicated to posting such links and to discussing the issues and the information and the sites linked. The presence or absence of a link should not be interpreted as necessarily an endorsement of the site or its views or claims. In some cases, I expect to include links to sites as examples of abuse or violations of public users' privacy. As a start, a link from the site "ZeroKnowledgePrivacyFoundation" : The Fine Print of Privacy (a text presentation via series of slides)

Justice Thurgood Marshall dissented from the majority opinion in this case and Justice William J. Brennan joined him in his dissenting opinion, in which Marshall wrote, Of course, when the people who debated the fine points of the United States Constitution eventually determined to add, as an amendment to improve their work, the Fourth Amendment, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." (*) they understood that there is nothing magical about these words, nothing that should in and of itself vouchsafe that generations later, the publics to whom they left this civil right, would understand it or care about it enough to keep it rather than shrugging it off as no longer convenient to their consumer-society of digital gadgetry. (*) In J. Madison's earlier versions, the text and scope of the Fourth Amendment was even stronger than what was finally adopted. See Madison's Notes on the Constitutional Convention.)

"...but you do not know who the person is without more information. As I have been saying." You've been saying that, yes. But this indicates that that repeated assertion is false, for, as the study says explicitly, ..."four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals". What else except "knowing who the person is" does "uniquely identify 95% of the individuals" mean? (emphasis added). You are now faced with a documented report providing direct evidence that indicates that your repeated claim is false--not to mention that, in the metadata as a collective whole that's under consideration here, there is obvisously an enormous range of other "corroborative data" (that is the "outside information" which to which the authors refer) which supplements the data which this study reviewed-- i.e. "mobility data". As the authors write, concerning just that, the effects of augmenting the mobility data with "outside information": "Modern information technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones, however, magnify the uniqueness of individuals, further enhancing the traditional challenges to privacy. Mobility data is among the most sensitive data currently being collected."

There exists only one conceivable manner in which such an "oversight" might occur---namely, when an insider, someone with direct, personal knowledge of and access to documentation of abuse, has a "crisis of conscience" and, at enormous risk to himself or herself, reveals evidence and examples of the abuse. Everything else in "oversight" has been tried again and again and failed again and again: Senate and House committees, executive agencies, departments of ethics and oversight within the intelligence agencies themselves, periodic (crisis-driven) congressional hearings and "reform" legislation, which, again, experience has shown again and again, will be diluted, circumvented, depassed by technological evolution, etc. All of these have repeatedly failed to produce any effective and lasting improvements or even what would constitute a basic temporary practical "oversight" of what, in acts, programs, techniques, are, of course, inherently secret. There does not even exist any very important public sentiment which creates an effective climate of opposition to official government abuse of secret powers and secretly collected and used information which strikes directly at the public's own privacy rights and interests. In light of all that, all we have, our last resort, is to pin hopes on the only too rare occurrances of episodes such as the current one. I remember the incidents and the congressional hearings which, in 1978, led to the now-feckless reforms and corrective measures which, then, were supposed to prevent such things as we are today learning about from happening again.

"Hype"? Doesn't that mean "hyperbole"? This stuff is, in your opinion, "hyperbole"? What happens later, when more and more of what Greenwald has alluded to comes out for public inspection? Can we expect a comment from you on your characterization here of Greenwald's views as "hype"? I only just read the very article you cite. To me, it's "must-reading" --- and with the kind of programs Snowden has denounced, the government has all the tools necessary to locate (and, of course, secretly punish) any and all who it may now or at any future date please to define as "dangerous" and "deviant". And, it seems clear that many Americans are "fine with that". ----as are also "must-reading" some of the references linked in his article: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=1613914n (BTW, I'm not able to access the video--out of the CBS "user-market"-- but many other readers here can. Take advantage and learn.) http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/14/the-sickening-snowden-backlash.html

The Federation of American Scientists' "Project on Government Secrecy" Updated news and reports concerning government secrecy, a project of the Federation of American Scientists.

RE: "My argument is no, because unless the metadata has an identifier, there is nothing being revealed about you. What the government knows is that 555-1234 called 555-5678 and talked for 14 minutes. (Multiplied by millions of calls each day) What it doesn't know is that John Smith called Jane Jones and talked for 14 minutes. Absent that knowledge, what personal privacy intrusion is taking place?" John5746: RE: posts N° 3 & 32: Nature Scientific Reports (Open Access) "Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility" Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, César A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen & Vincent D. Blondel Scientific Reports 3, Article number: 1376 doi:10.1038/srep01376 Received 01 October 2012 Accepted 04 February 2013 Published 25 March 2013 We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the 1/10 power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals." ... " Modern information technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones, however, magnify the uniqueness of individuals, further enhancing the traditional challenges to privacy. Mobility data is among the most sensitive data currently being collected. Mobility data contains the approximate whereabouts of individuals and can be used to reconstruct individuals' movements across space and time. ... " A simply anonymized dataset does not contain name, home address, phone number or other obvious identifier. Yet, if individual's patterns are unique enough, outside information can be used to link the data back to an individual. For instance, in one study, a medical database was successfully combined with a voters list to extract the health record of the governor of Massachusetts27. In another, mobile phone data have been re-identified using users' top locations28. Finally, part of the Netflix challenge dataset was re-identified using outside information from The Internet Movie Database29. ... " All together, the ubiquity of mobility datasets, the uniqueness of human traces, and the information that can be inferred from them highlight the importance of understanding the privacy bounds of human mobility. We show that the uniqueness of human mobility traces is high and that mobility datasets are likely to be re-identifiable using information only on a few outside locations. Finally, we show that one formula determines the uniqueness of mobility traces providing mathematical bounds to the privacy of mobility data. The uniqueness of traces is found to decrease according to a power function with an exponent that scales linearly with the number of known spatio-temporal points. This implies that even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. " http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130325/srep01376/full/srep01376.htm

@ 30 : "This thread is very much aimed at an almost procedural debate on the privacy of metadata." Very well then, What does "metadata" denote, mean, and include? And what, if anything, distinguishes "meta" in metadata from any other sort of data? That is, in other words, what about "metadata" essentially, intrinsically, different from so-called plain "data"-- and why ought anyone accept this distinction as worthy, valid? And, RE: "Is metadata private?", what is the significance of the term, as you intend it, of "private"? Can this question be adequately discussed without a clear idea of what you mean by "private"? Which of the following, if any, are intended by "private"? "not practically susceptible to examination" or "to view[ing]? or "not legally susceptible to view or search" ? Does "private" mean "concealed" ? Does it mean "concealable" ? "Sensitive" ? "Privileged" ?

Jailed? Homosexuals? Over centuries, and, in numerous places around the world today, being identified as homosexual meant (and today still means) liability for not jail but lethal execution--burning at the stake, beheading, stoning to death, etc. Law enforcement is arbitrary and always has been. More grist for the topic's mill: "Snowden saw what I saw: surveillance criminally subverting the constitution"

! Moderator Note moved in from is metadata private thread - sorry for confusion. @21 refers to that post in that thread. imatfaal RE @ 21: "I want to know why gathering metadata, and metadata alone, is considered by some as an invasion of privacy, for reasons other than "the government might abuse its power" in my post N° 14, above, ( http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/75732-is-metadata-private/#entry749657), I cited at letter to the relevant U.S. House and Senate Intelligence Committee's chairpersons and ranking members from EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center, epic.com) in which the Center's lawyers argue that the FISA Court's authority could not include the power to grant such collections of data concerning solely U.S. domestic (including U.S. citizens) sources--because the FISA (Act) empowering the Court's authorities concerns the collection of information pursuant to foreign intelligence operations. link: http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/ and, though I didn't include this portion in the post, it is nevertheless in the letter linked, where the Center's lawyers argue that,

from the thread: Politicas/ "Is metadata private?" topic/75732-is-metadata-private/page-2 http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/75732-is-metadata-private/#entry749657 @ 21 http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/75732-is-metadata-private/page-2#entry749762 : "That's not what I'm wanting to discuss. ... "A government abusing its power is a completely separate issue." (my emphasis added) & @ 28 (addressed to "overtone" @ 27) : "If you're not interested in discussing the OP within the parameters I've outlined, please start a new thread for your discussion." As a matter of general principle, I'd like to know what officialdom's formal opinion is concerning an original poster's power to determine what is and isn't germaine to the topic of a thread he or she starts. In my own experience here, I haven't seen the slightest indication that my view of what is in or out of bounds in a thread I've started (or, in any thread I participate(d) in, for that matter) has had any influence on what others participating think and write about the topic. In "Is metadata private?", given the posts cited just above, it appears that the OP, Swansont, is insisting that discussion of what official government authorities can or should be lawfully allowed to do or not do concerning search and seizure of data is not within the scope of the discussion of "Is metadata private?" as he sees it. Interesting! I never "knew" I enjoyed such power over what another could raise and discuss as a matter related to a topic I've launched. Instead, I've found that in my case and others, our opinions about that aren't determinative at all. It appears that "Is metadata private?" doesn't mean or include, "...private from the government", but means, rather, in some existential, Platonically ethereal sense, "just 'private' ", period. If so, then, indeed, I didn't and haven't understood this to be the case and, indeed, we do need to "start a new thread for [such a] discussion", I think. What, please, is the current situation on this question?

I'm truly astounded that so many really smart people can so utterly miss a point. When Edward Snowden, after years of experience as a contract employee working as an IT systems-administrator with the C.I.A. and N.S.A. at various stations around the world, decided after many, many months of consideration, that his work and that of others like him in the intelligence agencies was a direct and serious "existential threat to democracy" he undertook a course of action to reveal the nature and operational details of that threat and, in doing that, he forsook his $100K+ job, career, home, girlfriend--along with his entire family in the U.S.--and placed a few belongings in a suitcase and left--with the bombshell of data he'd carefully chosen to make clear not what the government "might do one day" if it ran amok, but what, from his direct first-hand experiences, it was doing and long had been doing. ETA: He knows that, if he's lucky, he'll live the rest of his life as a fugitive--unless one day there comes about a government in the U.S. with something that even remotely approaches Snowden's standing in moral character, in which case, it may recognize and thank him for his courage rather than relentlessly hunt him down for arrest, trial, conviction and imprisonment. Maybe, if he's lucky, he can find a place where he'll be granted effective asylum and refuge from the U.S. arrest warrants. Even so, he knows he'll never again be able to live without a nagging concern about his safety and his settled living conditions. Until such time, he's going to have to run, hide, and live from hour to hour. Who here, reading and commenting in these threads has even 1/100th of the strength that Snowden acted upon--sacrfificing virtually everything, for reasons of conscience and knowing that, at best, a minority of his fellow countrymen would understand and approve of his acts? Snowden wasn't and isn't a fool. He gave up a life of much better than average comfort out of a conscientious set of morally-founded principles: the direct and present reduction of his country's most basic freedoms to so much expendable garbage. He took his actions after long hesitation, inner and conflicted debate, and after arriving at last at a moment of crystal clarity in his own mind concerning the absolute necessity that someone do something and his very reluctant recognition that experience forced on him: there was no one else who was going to do for him what his conscience compelled him to see had to be done. Whatever concern N.S.A.'s thousands of direct or contract employees may have had over the past "thirty years", none of them, not one, ever got so far in his or her moral maturity to see and understand what Snowden saw and understood, and then to act on that. Instead, if and when their consciences troubled them, all these thousands of others did, for years, whatever they needed to do to silence, again and again, perhaps, their troubled consciences. But they must not have been as deeply troubled as Snowden, because they did silence their consciences. He found that he could not. That's to his credit. ETA: