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Gordon Welchman first productionized “traffic analysis” in WW2 at Bletchley Park. When in his retirement he tried to write about it, it was his work on traffic

Gordon Welchman first productionized “traffic analysis” in WW2 at Bletchley Park. When in his retirement he tried to write about it, it was his work on traffic analysis more than his disclosing that the allies had cracked enigma that most worried the NSA who tried to stop him publishing. Traffic analysis is in many ways more valuable than the contents of the messages. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Welchman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Welchman

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
I won't say that metadata isn't valuable, but I still don't think it's holographic. You can tell I WhatsApp my friend every day around noon, so we're probably talking about lunch, but you don't know that today I had a tuna sandwich.
- wood_spirit 2y ago
  Old thread but I think there’s a wood and trees thing here. Traffic analysis is king because who you communicate with is a low noise signal and what you communicate is usually noise. This is well known for police work and military intelligence etc. It’s also true for ad sales. Ad networks want the trackers on sites so they can build up a profile of you based on metadata not the content of the pages you visit themselves.
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    Yeah, that's all fine, but the original claim was that: > Metadata is holographic[0] to message content ... > [0] X is holographic to Y when the contents of X can be used to completely reconstruct Y To say something is holographic is a claim about data, not of value. I totally buy that metadata is valuable, it could even be more valuable than the contents, but it's not a means to reproduce the message content. My ISP can tell where I bank, which is certainly valuable to observers, but it can't tell my password or the contents of my accounts, all of which I transmit. That's not a holographic reconstruction.

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago

I won't say that metadata isn't valuable, but I still don't think it's holographic. You can tell I WhatsApp my friend every day around noon, so we're probably talking about lunch, but you don't know that today I had a tuna sandwich.

wood_spirit 2y ago
Old thread but I think there’s a wood and trees thing here. Traffic analysis is king because who you communicate with is a low noise signal and what you communicate is usually noise. This is well known for police work and military intelligence etc. It’s also true for ad sales. Ad networks want the trackers on sites so they can build up a profile of you based on metadata not the content of the pages you visit themselves.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  Yeah, that's all fine, but the original claim was that: > Metadata is holographic[0] to message content ... > [0] X is holographic to Y when the contents of X can be used to completely reconstruct Y To say something is holographic is a claim about data, not of value. I totally buy that metadata is valuable, it could even be more valuable than the contents, but it's not a means to reproduce the message content. My ISP can tell where I bank, which is certainly valuable to observers, but it can't tell my password or the contents of my accounts, all of which I transmit. That's not a holographic reconstruction.