Leon said that the mass collection of phone metadata, revealed by the Guardian in June, was "indiscriminate" and "arbitrary" in its scope.
Leon said that the mass collection of phone metadata, revealed by the Guardian in June, appeared to be an "indiscriminate" and "arbitrary" invasion of privacy.
This was perhaps inevitable after the programme's overwhelming rejection by Congress, and after a US court of appeal ruled that the bulk collection of telephone metadata revealed by Snowden was unlawful.
In fact, the metadata revealed quite a lot.
One of the most controversial aspects of the NSA's surveillance operation is its collection of bulk telephony metadata, revealed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
That was always a hollow defense — metadata reveals a great deal that is properly private, as Jane Mayer explains — but it is especially meaningless now, in the face of what appears to be a sprawling effort to look over the shoulders of Internet users.
And he's done it, in the best tradition of computer hackers, using off-the-shelf resources: he has scoured through previously secret court filings for technical details about the NSA's activities, and he built an app that users can install on their phones to see how much their call metadata reveals.
However, previous studies have revealed that the metadata describing these data can possibly be contaminated by instrumentation response errors that are often difficult to recognize from visual waveform checks.
For the metadata heuristic, error analysis of the 10 documents revealed that the majority of the errors were caused by misspelled toponyms in articles, annotation errors, and some minor deviations from the annotation guidelines.
While the government insists that it does not record conversations, metadata can reveal information that could traditionally only be obtained by examining the actual content of conversations.
