I don't understand this Snowden "controversy"

[TorchTheWitch]

75. they aren't just storing it

If you've read anything at all about this and paid any attention at all to what is being said by the government you'd know that. They are USING this metadata as an attempt to FIND probable cause against individuals in order to get rubber-stamp warrants to further investigate Americans by listening to their phone conversations, physically surveil them and who the hell knows what. They're hardly just STORING it. They're actively sifting through all this metadata on everyone looking for "patterns", and who the hell knows how many degrees of separation they decide in finding all these "patterns" before listening in on calls and other surveillance.

Suppose my gynecologist's sister's friend's nephew is a suspected terrorist... is that enough degrees of separation for them to not listen in to my phone calls with my gynecologist or track me going to his office and then finding out personal private medical information about me that doesn't have jack shit to do with any terrorist? We don't know that. We don't even know if their deciding this nephew of the friend of my gynecologist's sister is a terrorist at all or why they suspect he is... how do we know if they decided he was a suspected terrorist because he talked to his brother's friend's neighbor's brother-in-law somewhere in the Middle East? We have no idea in the world what they're looking into with this metadata or how they're deciding what's "suspicious" or what "patterns" they're looking at, or how many degrees of separation between an individual and a "suspected terrorist" is good enough for no FURTHER scrutiny they'd need a rubber-stamp warrant for?

What we DO know is that their collecting the metadata of Americans' innocent communications and USING it however the hell they USE it to FIND probable cause against certain individuals that is SURVEILLANCE in and of itself. They are USING this metadata to SURVEIL everyone in order to find information to surveil them further by more intrusive means.

And metadata is MORE intrusive than listening to phone calls...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/06/verizon-nsa-metadata-surveillance-problem.html

The gist of the defense was that, in contrast to what took place under the Bush Administration, this form of secret domestic surveillance was legitimate because Congress had authorized it, and the judicial branch had ratified it, and the actual words spoken by one American to another were still private. So how bad could it be?

The answer, according to the mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas Drake and who is also the author of "Surveillance or Security?,' is that it’s worse than many might think.

"The public doesn't understand," she told me, speaking about so-called metadata. "It’s much more intrusive than content." She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying "who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening - you don’t need the content."

For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: "You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members." And information from cell-phone towers can reveal the caller's location. Metadata, she pointed out, can be so revelatory about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive stories that it can make more traditional tools in leak investigations, like search warrants and subpoenas, look quaint. "You can see the sources," she said. When the F.B.I. obtains such records from news agencies, the Attorney General is required to sign off on each invasion of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up millions of records a minute, it’s unclear if any such brakes are applied.