The "megadata" threat

I just want to say, on this question of metadata, which means just the outside of the calls, who you call, for how long, I interviewed someone named Susan Landau this week, who is an engineer with Sun Microsystems, or she used to be. And she's an expert in this area of privacy and computers. And she says, people don't understand metadata is incredibly invasive and revealing.

You don't need to know the content if you can look at everybody who someone has called. You can figure out a pattern. They can tell if they called their doctor. You can see if there's a corporate takeover. You can see if there are opponents of the government meeting someplace. ...Jane Mayer