Best Posts in Thread: GCHQ tracked 100 billion metadata records

I have no problem with countries keeping secrets. Some things just shouldn't be put out there for "national security" (a phrase I don't like much since governments abuse the sh*t out of it). There needs to be a limit on what information they can do and have access to, there needs to be some oversight on their activities and the courts need to prosecute people who violate the law.

I am a bit curious what they mean by "metadata" in the OP article. That is a pretty vague term and I couldn't find any clear-cut definition on a UK government website (and "matadata" to me means something very different from what they are talking about here). That is probably intentional since law enforcement agencies do not want to restrict what they have access to as technology quickly grows. From what I can find this is what governments consider "metadata" in general:

• Telephone numbers
• The time and length of phone calls
• The internet protocol addresses (IP addresses) of computers from which messages are received or sent
• Location of parties making phone calls
• To and from email addresses on emails
• Logs of visitors to chat rooms online
• Status of chat sites – whether they are active and how many people are participating
• Chat aliases or identifiers (the name a person uses in a chat room online)
• Start and finish times of internet sessions
• The location of an individual involved in communications
• The name of the application someone uses online and when, where and for how long used

That's a pretty f'n broad definition and a search warrant should be required to obtain almost any of that information on an individual....and should be destroyed after it's use. Even if they aren't using it for nefarious purposes the government has had a few problems keeping secrets secret. It probably wouldn't be good if some @ss-hat hacker got his hands on all the information listed above for every single person who has used a phone or the internet in the past couple years. Also, while I don't feel there is such a person calling shots today, could you imagine how useful this information would have been to someone like Hitler, Stalin.....or would be to Donald Trump? It doesn't take much or very long for a government to go from badly managed (almost all governments) to total douchebaggery (Nazi Germany, Communist Russia....United Trump Properties of America).

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." - John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton

First time I've seen that second part of that quote and I have to say that it seems to be spot on.....certainly when speaking of politicians.

 

I bet that really helped them assess security threats. Our governments are out of control.