NSA Collected US Email Records In Bulk For More Than Two Years Under Obama (w/Documents) - Guardian

[Romulus Quirinus]

35. What would he do with them, if we had an NHS?

other than attempt to dismantle it, of course.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but it seems to me that a health record containing a history of foot corns and diabeetus isn't as threatening, in that case, as a history of email exchanges with someone who is now bad odor with the law.
Perhaps they could reveal a history of STDs, but that same data could be extracted using either bag of dirty tricks.

I should elaborate on what I mean by "Sword of Damocles." While the law states that only metadata may be kept, the infrastructure is in place to do so much more. Would it not be a straight forward change to command such a system to, for example, keep entire email messages rather than harvesting headers only? Perhaps even a one-liner in the responsible code.

While this sword is not falling on us at this moment, it would only take a secret legal opinion and the stroke of a pen from a less enlightened inhabitant of the Executive Suite to drop it on us all. I recognize that this capability is, in some sense, here to stay, and arguably necessary. Since a penny of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and since the system is not going away, I'd rather we set strong, public constraints on these programs now (change the thread holding the sword into a logger's chain) in order to decrease the risk, rather than wait until the line snaps. Attempts at such strong controls have been attempted with health records (HIPAA), with mixed success.