4 ms·

Just for the record -- unless somebody is also storing the contents of the calls, which the NSA strenuously claims isn't happening, it's NOT metadata. It's just

• delinka 13y ago
  Meh. The call itself, and the data about the call, traverse the telephone network. The data about the call, the metadata, is being logged and stored. Yes, by the time it gets to an NSA storage device, it's no longer "meta," but at the time the human made a call and generated the metadata, it was metadata. This is the tag we've chosen to stick on it. That the tag maybe should change doesn't really change the privacy implications, and would only serve to confuse the conversation to a populace that already doesn't seem to care.
• lucozade 13y ago
  Only if you define data as "something that the NSA has". I appreciate that they've overstepped their boundaries but this is probably taking things a bit far. The existence of metadata doesn't imply the continued existence of the original data. Just that it has existed.
• deathanatos 13y ago
  Let's be perfectly clear here: > Metadata is "data about data" Just shorten that to "Metadata is data." That's what it is, and always has been. This weird idea that it is some sort of second-class citizen of data is the problem and allows the government to hide behind "it's just metadata": it's still data, and should be treated as such. I wouldn't care if it were an empty file: it's still data, and you still need a warrant or probable cause, not a terrorist witch hunt.