Among the NSA secrets leaked by Snowden was a court order that compelled telecommunications company Verizon to turn over metadata (such as numbers dialed and duration of calls) for millions of its subscribers.
June brought a new set of problems for the administration when it was forced to respond to the revelation that the National Security Agency NSAA) had compelled a telecommunications company to turn over metadata (such as numbers dialed and duration of calls) for millions of its subscribers.
One is a court order telling Verizon, a telecoms company, to hand over "metadata", such as the duration, direction and location of subscribers' calls.
Some technology executives think one middle path would be to encourage the use of encryption for the content of messages while maintaining the ability to hand over metadata, which reveals who is speaking to whom, how often and when.
The arguments over "metadata" go to the heart of how outdated the current laws are, with the security services routinely arguing that it's the content of emails and phone calls that matters.
(2) Communications brands with consumer relationships that hand over metadata and/or open taps on internet traffic for collection by the NSA and Britain's GCHQ, creating vast databases that can then be searched via XKeyscore.
This new legal challenge to the power of government agencies to spy on Americans follows the publication last month by the Guardian of a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordering Verizon to hand over metadata from its phone records.
In his ruling, Judge Leon expressly rejected the government's claim that the 1979 supreme court case, Smith v Maryland, which the NSA and the Obama administration often cite to argue that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy over metadata, applies in the NSA's bulk-metadata collection.
Semantic Associations are complex relationships between entities over metadata represented in a RDF graph.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has revealed the company has been co-operating with the UK government in handing over metadata in the wake of a series of terror attacks in the country — which he described as "horrendous".
Our national policy discourse, so intensely focused on the precedence of digital content over metadata, only further exacerbates the misbalance in how the private industry – from global corporations to small start-ups –treat these two types of data.
