Metadata Liberation Movement

[Commentary] With respect to the famous metadata surveillance, why is it conducted by a secret agency at all?

This is the program that anonymously collects data about electronic transactions—from the time, duration and numbers involved in a phone call, to email connections, to financial transactions—everything but the actual content. It may be that Americans have nothing to fear from computers raking through piles of anonymous data. The threat to liberty and privacy comes only when computers kick up red flags for an actual human being to look at, which now means an employee of an agency necessarily removed from popular oversight. The biggest problem, then, with metadata surveillance may simply be that the wrong agencies are in charge of it. One particular reason why this matters is that the potential of metadata surveillance might actually be quite large but is being squandered by secret agencies whose narrow interest is only looking for terrorists.