What is MetaData?

[TalkingDog]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/interactive/2013/jun/12/what-is-metadata-nsa-surveillance#meta=0000000

And

http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/06/what-is-this-metadata-the-nsa-is-collecting-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-2681968.html

METADATA:

Metadata is information generated as you use technology, and its use has been the subject of controversy since NSA's secret surveillance program was revealed.

Examples include the date and time you called somebody or the location from which you last accessed your email. The data collected generally does not contain personal or content-specific details, but rather transactional information about the user, the device and activities taking place. In some cases you can limit the information that is collected – by turning off location services on your cell phone for instance – but many times you cannot. Here is some of the data collected through activities you do every day.


Email

email
sender's name, email and IP address
recipient's name and email address
server transfer information
date, time and timezone
unique identifier of email and related emails
content type and encoding
mail client login records with IP address
mail client header formats
priority and categories
subject of email
status of the email
read receipt request

Phone

phone number of every caller
unique serial numbers of phones involved
time of call
duration of call
location of each participant
telephone calling card numbers

Camera

photographer identification
creation and modification date and time
location where photo was taken
details about a photo's contents
copyright information
camera make and model
camera settings: shutter speed, f-stop, focal length and flash type
photo dimensions, resolution and orientation

Facebook

your name and profile bio information including birthday, hometown, work history and interests
your username and unique identifier
your subscriptions
your location
your device
activity date, time and timezone
your activities, likes, checkins and events

Twitter

your name, location, language, profile bio information and url
when you created your account
your username and unique identifier
tweet's location, date, time and timezone
tweet's unique ID and ID of tweet replied to
contributor IDs
your follower, following and favorite count
your verification status
application sending the tweet

Google Search

your search queries
results that appeared in searches
pages you visit from search

Web Browser

your activity including pages you visit and when
user data and possibly user login details with auto-fill feature your IP address, internet service provider, device hardware details, operating system and browser version
cookies and cached data from websites

[chervilant]

1. All in all,

entirely too much information about WE THE PEOPLE! Is this the extent and type of surveillance you think our government needs? Does anyone?

[dawg]

2. The potential for abuse is tremendous.

I'm all for allowing surveillance of suspected terror suspects, but blanket warrants for data on all citizens is un-American.

[bluestate10]

10. Who executed a blanket warrant for data on all citizens?

Do you understand statistics and probability? Yes, there is some chance that meta data may result in your phone or email being tapped, but that chance is small unless you are involved in terror and in the wrong place at the wrong time. My argument if a statistical evaluation of your phone calls, emails and online contacts highlight you as suspect, your phone, email or online accounts should be tapped to prove that you were innocently calling a suspect number, or innocently associating with a suspect person or organization. No one is going to kick in your door and drag you until the night of accessing Al's pleasure emporium's best videos because that is out of scope.

[dawg]

11. The warrant was *for* the metadata.

I'm not worried so much about my phone being tapped. I'm worried about a huge database of metadata that can be searched whenever someone powerful wants to see what they can find out about someone they want to "influence".

The warrant we know about was for metadata for *all* of Verizon's customers.

This is a big fucking deal. It is dangerous.

God forbid if there is more than we don't even know about yet.

[1-Old-Man]

3. What is Metadata? A term meant to confuse.

It is a term chosen to avoid saying they tap every form of electronic communication and/or stored personal data.

[MH1]

8. Actually, no, the word "metadata" has a very specific meaning.

It is not meant to confuse, it adds precision vs. just saying "data". "Data" could include content. "Metadata" clearly does not.

A simple way to define "metadata" is that it is "data about data".

It's a widely used term in information science. No one just made it up just to confuse YOU.

[1-Old-Man]

14. Then why can't I find it in my dictionaries?

[bluestate10]

12. All communication has tags on it.

Meta data are just the tags that are used when communication is transmitted or received. No content is in the information, so there is no chance that some government agent is listening in on your phone calls, emails or other online communication. What meta data can be used for, and this gets to what the NSA does, is be statistically analyzed to look for data matches that meet specific criteria, in the NSA's case, that criteria is does meta data associated with one account, phone number or email address has a high degree of frequency of corresponding with another account, phone number or email address that the NSA highly suspects is owned by a terrorist or is affiliated with a terrorist organization.

[Harmony Blue]

4. Having your metadata can severely

trample on your freedom of association rights in the wrong hands.

[bluestate10]

13. How is that? nt

[usGovOwesUs3Trillion]

5. It is extra information about content or activity, usually used to help sort and/or route it

you can think of it as content plus the details e.g.

I have a document I wrote.
The software automatically creates 'meta-data' about the document.

When you open the document, you can read the content.
When you open the meta-data about the document you can see...
The Author
Subject
The Time Created
The Time Edited
Maybe some machine information (OS, Hardware SN, etc)
etc

When you take a picture, your camera will automatically add meta-data to the image
The exposure
Other camera settings
GPS
Date
etc

So that is it in a nutshell, it depends on what the content, or activity is, and what the software running is, that determines how much, or how little meta-data is associated with it.

[MH1]

9. Metadata is NOT "content plus details"

it is information about the transaction or message, not the content.

[usGovOwesUs3Trillion]

16. Right, that is typically attached to the content

Content, plus it's meta-data

[MH1]

17. Just curious, do you work in IT?

Because I do and that's not my experience with the applications I work with.

In fact since I sometimes deal with applications that process sensitive data, it had better not be showing me the content when all I need to debug it is metadata. I have zero desire to see stuff I don't need to see to do my job, and if the program makes it possible for me to see it, then that's more work ($$$) for the auditors and more chance I accidentally do something I shouldn't and then have to explain it.

[HipChick]

6. If you have nothing to hide...

the worst thing they will find out about me is I buy wine with Groupon coupons.. and I play Candy Cane Saga when I should be asleep..

[Rex]

7. They don't care if you pick your nose or are right or left handed.

They care about where you are at any given time and your hobbies, interests, habits..gee WHY DOES that sound so familiar?

OH RIGHT...

Spying on the Supreme Court

While Hoover’s most egregious abuses of power are associated with the civil-rights era, as early as the mid-1930s the FBI may have been wiretapping the Supreme Court. Weiner reports, “Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes suspected that Hoover had wired the conference room where the justices met to decide cases.” The wiretapping was in connection with a bureau investigation into alleged leaking of Supreme Court decisions, during which the home phone of one of the high court’s clerks was tapped. But if Hoover could bug the innermost sanctum of the Supreme Court, nothing was sacred for the FBI.

The FBI and Newsweek’s Joint Counterintelligence

The newsmagazine was once featured in an FBI mission. With the blessing of Vincent Astor, who owned Newsweek from 1937 to 1959, a double agent opened the offices of a front company called the Diesel Research Corporation, funded by German intelligence, in the building that the magazine occupied at the time in midtown Manhattan. The offices were extensively bugged with “hidden microphones and cameras.” The result of the operation was to shut down an entire German intelligence network in the United States.

The FBI’s ‘Who’s Who of Homosexuals in America’

On the eve of the 1960 presidential election, when Cold War tensions were at one of their highest points, President Eisenhower and Hoover spent an entire meeting of the National Security Council discussing the gravest threat to the United States—gays. Two code breakers at the National Security Agency, rumored to be gay lovers, had defected to the Soviets. The logical conclusion for Eisenhower and Hoover was to link communism and homosexuality. While Eisenhower had promulgated an executive order banning gays from government service at the beginning of his term, he now directed Hoover to create a centralized “list of homosexuals” to prevent gays from being hired to government positions in the future.

Congressional Sex Palace in the Dominican Republic

Rafael Trujillo was the heavy-handed military dictator of the Dominican Republic in 1961. While Trujillo was a staunch anticommunist, he also was deeply corrupt, bribing numerous American elected officials and maintaining a friendly relationship with the Mafia. His crimes, including committing murder on American soil, had become too much for the U.S. to tolerate. But as the FBI gathered intelligence for an eventual coup, it became clear that Trujillo was bribing elected officials not just with money but also with sex. He had set up a “love nest” that the U.S. ambassador, a former FBI agent, described as “totally wired. There were two-way mirrors. There was a supply of whatever one wanted in the way of your desire. A number of our Congressmen made use of that and were photographed and taped.”

J. Edgar Hoover as an Interior Designer

Soon after taking office as president, Richard Nixon, along with Attorney General John Mitchell and then-White House counsel John Ehrlichman, was invited to Hoover’s house for dinner. While the discussion was of “FBI operations against domestic radicals and foreigners,” many of which were of dubious legality, the décor was far more eye-catching. Hoover’s living room was “dingy, almost seedy” and “its walls covered with old glossies of Hoover with dead movie stars.” The basement had a “wet bar decorated with pin-up drawings of half-naked women.” But most exotic was Hoover’s dining room, “lit with lava lamps glowing purple, green, yellow, and red.”

Hoover and the Pentagon Papers

The Nixon White House created its unit of “Plumbers,” the secret group responsible for the Watergate break-in, because of Hoover’s refusal to investigate Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers. The FBI director didn’t have political motivations for his refusal. Instead, it was because Ellsberg’s father-in-law, Louis Marx, was a wealthy manufacturer who was a major donor to a charity run by Hoover. This meant he was officially listed as a “friend of the FBI.” Even though Marx was willing to testify against his son-in-law, Hoover nixed the idea of the FBI interviewing him, and fired the chief of the bureau’s Intelligence Division, who decided to plow ahead regardless.

[Arctic Dave]

15. Hmmm, I would have thought GPS tracking on your car would be on that also.

I wonder if people who have OnStar are aware they can do this.

[MineralMan]

18. It is data about data. nt

[randome]

19. No one cares about the safeguards and restraints in place.

Whenever S&G do another one of their 'dumps', they always leave out the part about safeguards and restraints. They never give a full picture.

Why do they do that? Because they don't know. That's not even editorializing, it's deliberately designed to cause a specific reaction.

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[font color="blue"][center]The truth doesn’t always set you free.
Sometimes it builds a bigger cage around the one you’re already in.[/center][/font]
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