But the most significant reform that has been undertaken as the result of an order from Obama is a reduction in the scope of metadata searches, from three "hops," or degrees of association, to two.
To solve these problems, several groups are developing registries of databases that capture key metadata describing the biological scope, utility, accessibility, ease-of-use and existence of web services allowing interoperability between resources.
In an attempt to limit the scope of phone metadata surveillance, NSA is purportedly following a "two-hop" rule: For any given person of interest, metadata can only be harvested from people called by that person, and then also people called by them.
The scope of the metadata that developers could harvest (and retain) probably isn't surprising to anyone who has worked in ad tech, or at any tech company, really.
The Second Circuit began its analysis by laying bare the "staggering" scope of the metadata collection program.
A warrant requires probable cause to be shown and it's clear that the hoovering of call metadata is indiscriminate in its scope and that probable cause is not available.
The Bush email metadata program had restrictions on the scope of the bulk email records the NSA could analyze.
As the quantity and variety of metadata increases, so, too, does the scope of the N.S.A.'s order.
While developing MRB, user feedback suggested that it would be helpful if users could go beyond simple categorization of the scope of resources to discover metadata describing database operations and functionality.
The scope of conversion is on the metadata level, i.e., conversion of "empty" forms (list of data elements, no patient-level data).
But as Patrick Di Justo has described (a point cited by Leon in his opinion), the data collected by today's bulk telephony-metadata surveillance is vastly different in scale and scope.
