Slope-a-dope

For 2014, all those claiming telephone or email metadata isn't invasive should voluntarily & regularly post their own for the world to see.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 1, 2014

You're tempted to agree with him for a minute, right? Fuck yeah, Orwellian scum, why don't you just show everybody yours.

In fact, I would totally do it, as a kind of conceptual art project if you will, if I could get a grant for it sufficient for paying somebody else to do the actual data entry work, or better, program an automated daily upload from all my email addresses and phone [jump]

Image by darkuncle.

numbers; I'd post it in the form of a blog under a dedicated gmail address composed of random digits, and automatically tweet the updates.

Image via Chris Sanders.

Only to make it more precisely comparable to the NSA collection I would lose it in the cloud. I wouldn't tell anybody, other than the granting agency, that I'd done it, and of course my name and the names of my friends and correspondents wouldn't be part of the data; so that the only way anybody would find out it was up there would be if they happened to Google one of the digit-and-character sequences on the list, mostly likely addresses or phone numbers. Then at the end of, say, six months, I'd take screenshots of 12 or 15 randomly chosen moments and destroy the rest of the data, and mount a show of my screenshots (blown up into handsome prints and framed for sale) at a Williamsburg gallery, and have an opening with white wine and vegan canapés.

Via The Verge.

Now, an arbitrary lunatic finding my metadata blog is not going to be anything like some geek in airport security laughing at my dick as seen in the full-body scanner, a possibility which really does disturb me more, perhaps, than is altogether healthy. It's different because they'd need to do a considerable amount of work to interpret the rows of data fields they see, and when they did a reverse lookup on my phone number they might well fail. I just found a site that pointed me for free from my cell number to my zip code, except it was the wrong zip code, so who knows what kind of service they provide when you pay them.

Nevertheless, there'd be a real, possibly measurable risk that somebody—the helpmeet, say, or my boss—could be searching that phone number on purpose, get to my secret website, and do all that work or hire a detective to do it (for me, not for the friends and associates, since their contacts with me are the only ones documented—no NSA hops into their networks). And then they'd find out all about my frequent emails to XXXFurryFriends ("Jeez guys, can we please have more angora goat video?").

Seriously, I would not like that, whether I have "anything to hide" or not. And I don't care for the possibility that the NSA can do it, to me and two hops out, or to anybody, citizen or otherwise; it's why I'm enthusiastic about the recommendations of the Presidential Advisory Committee (as amusingly linked by the freedom-loving, surveillance-hating supporters of Kim Jong-un here, and hey Kevin Gosztola, do you know who's linking you?) to get this stuff under some independent control. But Greenwald's tweet, and this from the Leon opinion

Via Townhall.

are just wrong, and in fact a case of Bad Writing. The metadata isn't invasive, it's the use of the metadata that may be invasive, and confusing the two is a propaganda abuse, making it look as though we've tumbled over an edge to which we are not even particularly close.

The NSA does not have the capacity to profile for a particular set of people (Muslims, CounterPunch subscribers, or Man-Dog Love Associates), as the truly invasive FBI possibly does. The NSA does not have the capacity to photograph you as you pee, and they may be dumb but they're not dumb enough to photograph you, if they do have that capacity, as you stare glumly at your computer screen or walk back and forth around it, with a bag of Cheetos in hand. The NSA can only pick a number (legally, only a foreign number or email address) and follow it through to other numbers with which it may or may not display an interesting pattern of relations, and then try to find out whose numbers exactly they are.

They are, I believe, likely to go wrong in a couple of different ways here, finding things out that they shouldn't (like the XXXFurryFriends connection) and failing to find out things they should (like who Ayman al-Zawahiri plays Words With Friends with), and I'm morally certain the latter is a much more prevalent problem than the former. But the slope from there to fascism is a lot less slippery than that from the folks that Pastor Niemöller failed to speak for to the pastor himself, so much so that it really barely exists.

Image from EnemyOfTheState.