> If you have online contact with someone that's of interest, there's a chance all of your info will be of interest also. Yes, I believe two degrees of separat

> If you have online contact with someone that's of interest, there's a chance all of your info will be of interest also. Yes, I believe two degrees of separation is the rule of thumb here. McCarty is one degree, so to complete the graph, they need all his data. William Binney mentioned this two-degree rule in his recent interview w/ USA Today (warning, autoplay): http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowd... Note that two degrees was Binney's conservative proposal at the time to help preserve the privacy of the general population. The higher-ups weren't interested. But I assume there has been some research into how many degrees of separation are required to reach some threshold of confidence, and 2 degrees is pretty good.