> When your elected government snoops on you, they famously prefer the metadata https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/nsa-americans-metadata-year-docume

> When your elected government snoops on you, they famously prefer the metadata https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/nsa-americans-metadata-year-documents https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/nsa-americans-... of who you emailed, phoned or chatted to the content of the messages themselves. It seems to be much more tractable to flag people of interest to the security services based on who their friends are and what websites they visit than to do clever AI on the messages they send. Once they're flagged, a human can always read their email anyway. But isn't that at least partly due to legal issues, like the pen-register precedents in the US?