Playing Hide And Seek With Metadata
Despite the fact that the Office of Personnel Management is still recovering from an alleged Chinese master data cyber-attack impacting at least 18 million unique social security numbers, it’s the manipulation of metadata (or “meta-dahta,” the hold-out pronunciation of choice by U.S. cable newscasters and analysts), which outrages and frightens us most. Is metadata getting a bum rap? Prior to the recent revision of the Patriot Act stipulating phone records can no longer be stored by the NSA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation excoriated the Obama administration with this: “If the President’s administration really welcomes a robust debate on the government’s surveillance power, it needs to start being honest about the invasiveness of collecting your metadata....