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13 Jun, 2013

Opinion: Roll back the surveillance state – POLITICO.com

Last year, there were 212 of these Section 215 orders so the full extent of the NSA’s surveillance is still within the agency’s black box. Some news reports say that these programs include financial data and email records too. This is entirely possible given the breadth of Section 215. The program’s advocates claim that records do not implicate privacy and that the collection of “metadata” does not infringe on anyone’s rights.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

These records reflect who you know, what you do, and where you go. Furthermore, if metadata wasn’t incredibly rich and revealing, the government wouldn’t be collecting them at a breakneck pace. As mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, metadata is “much more intrusive than content.”

Read the rest: Opinion: Roll back the surveillance state – POLITICO.com.