Updated: June 6, 2013 | (1984)
And six other questions arising from the latest White House scandal.
Washington is reeling after a court order was uncovered last night showing Verizon has secretly been handing over reams of customer phone records to the National Security Agency on a daily basis. The records don’t contain the content of phone calls—so, just to be clear, this isn’t wiretapping—but they do contain information such as phone numbers, the location and duration of calls, and subscriber and handset ID numbers, all of which fall under the category of “telephony metadata.”
Unless the NSA has some superpowered intelligence algorithm that helps them separate signal from noise, the agency is simply Hoovering up vast amounts of noise for little if any signal.
Calibrating the appropriate level of outrage will probably occupy us for most of the day. But far from a frivolous exercise, it’s an important process, because it involves the weighing of factors that might or might not matter to you depending on how serious (or potentially expansive) you think this violation of user privacy really is.
The court order alone probably doesn’t merit the ACLU’s charge that it was “beyond Orwellian”—though it’s no small irony that “1984” was published 64 years ago today.
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