One of the most disingenuous arguments in the aftermath of the NSA spying revelations is that the American people shouldn't be concerned about the government hoovering up its sensitive information because it's only metadata--or a fancy way of saying data about the data.
"This is just metadata," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein assured the American people, referring to the NSA's bulk collection of Americans call records. "There is no content involved." President Obama and his national security officials have made similar assurances.
Feel better? You shouldn't and here's why.
A tool developed by MIT Media Lab proves how intrusive the collection and analysis of metadata is over time, especially for those who are overly reliant on email as their main method of communication. Dubbed "Immersion," the tool analyzes the metadata--From, To, Cc and Timestamp fields-- from a volunteer's Gmail account and visualizes it.
In the interest of proving how absolutely invasive and telling a person's e-mail metadata is, I've allowed Immersion to analyze almost 9 years of my Gmail history. The results are incredibly cool--when done voluntarily--and absolutely frightening--when you consider government does this analysis without consent or judicial oversight. While the data visualizations below have been anonymized--which Immersion allows users to do--I'll briefly describe how incredibly powerful and revealing such data crunching is when laid out in all its transparent glory. What you see here is a full analysis of my personal and professional networks over 8.8 years of using Gmail.
Over the last nine years, I've worked at a political magazine; went overseas for graduate study; worked at a security trade magazine; written numerous freelance pieces of journalism on terrorism, whistleblowing, domestic extremism, homeland security, and the civil liberties implications they all raise. I also dated frequently before meeting my wife and have established many friendships, and lost some along the way, over the last 9 years.
When visualized and analyzed over time, my data reveals my family members--who are all tightly grouped and linked together--and those people who I am, or was, closest to in each phase of my private and professional life. All of my various work colleagues are networked together as well as my many circles of friends, tethered together around high school, grad school, different work places, and even where I've lived. It's easy to tell which woman became my wife, when we met, and how our relationship grew stronger over time. By using Immersion's time scroll, I can go back in time, find my wife, and watch as her speck balloons into the biggest orb in my interconnected sea of circles.
The data visualization also shows potential discord over time, such as friends who have either become acquaintances or even possibly enemies. (If someone were to target individuals to gather dirt on me, my guess is they would start with people who had a history of communication with me and then suddenly trailed off or fell off a cliff, visually speaking. Immersion allows you to see this by simply clicking on a particular contact's circle, which reveals your "interaction volume.") And more worrisome for a journalist, it's easy to determine who my sources were for particular stories. This is why mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau told the New Yorker's Jane Mayer that metadata is "much more intrusive than content."
The data visualizations the tool spits out are even creepier since we know government metadata collection didn't stop at Americans' call records. When the Guardian recently published a 2009 report from the National Security Agency's inspector general, the public learned that the government collected their online records as well. (The latter program, known as MARINA, was terminated in 2011, although there's no way to know whether Internet metadata collection continues under another guise.)
When listening to the likes of President Obama and Sen. Feinstein talk about metadata, the impression you get is that government collection and analysis of metadata isn't an unconscionable intrusion into our most private spaces. A quick analysis of my own Gmail metadata proves how extraordinarily misleading this line of argumentation is.
Metadata, no matter what the detractors say, collected over time is an intimate repository of our lives--whom we love, whom we're friends with, where we work, where we worship (or don't), and whom we associate with politically. The right to privacy means our metadata shouldn't be collected and analyzed without reasonable suspicion that we've done something wrong.
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News & CommentaryDec 2024
Civil Liberties
National Security
Where Defense Secretary Nominee Pete Hegseth Stands on Civil LibertiesWhere Defense Secretary Nominee Pete Hegseth Stands on Civil Liberties
The ACLU has more than 100 years’ experience holding power accountable. As President-elect Donald Trump rolls out his cabinet picks, we analyze how his nominee for secretary of defense will impact civil liberties. -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
Free Speech
National Security
ACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok BanACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok Ban
WASHINGTON — Today, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block the enforcement of a law that would effectively ban people in America from using TikTok as soon as January 19, 2025. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected TikTok’s challenge to the law. TikTok has asked the Supreme Court for a temporary injunction to prevent the app from being banned while the court considers whether to take the case, saying that unless the justices intervene, the law will “shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration.” “The Constitution imposes an extraordinarily high bar on this kind of mass censorship,”said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. “The Supreme Court should take up this important case and protect the rights of millions of Americans to freely express themselves and engage with others around the world.” The brief argues that the D.C. Circuit failed to fully address the law’s profound implications for the First Amendment rights of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok. While the lower court’s decision correctly recognized that the statute triggers First Amendment scrutiny, it barely addressed users’ First Amendment interests in speaking, sharing, and receiving information on the platform. The court also perplexingly attempted to cast the government’s ban on TikTok as a vindication of users’ First Amendment rights, which it is not. The rights groups also explain that the law was intended to suppress certain content and viewpoints that many legislators believe could be amplified on TikTok, including the risk of foreign “propaganda.” But under the First Amendment, the government must meet a very high bar to restrict speech based on concerns about its “motivating ideology” or “perspective,” and the government has not come close to meeting that bar here. “The government should not be able to restrict speech, especially to the extent here, based on guessing about the mere possibility of uncertain future harm,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at EFF. “The Supreme Court should put the TikTok ban on hold while it considers the DC Circuit’s erroneous ruling.” Finally, the brief underscores that the government can’t impose this type of sweeping ban unless it’s necessary to prevent extremely serious and imminent harm to national security. But the government has not provided evidence of impending harm, or evidence that banning TikTok is the only available way to address its concerns. As the brief explains, the D.C. Circuit improperly treated the government’s invocation of “national security” as a trump card and failed to hold the government to its burden. “Restricting citizens’ access to foreign media is a practice that has long been associated with repressive regimes, and we should be very wary of letting the practice take root here,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It would do lasting damage to the First Amendment and our democracy if the Supreme Court let this ban go into effect even temporarily.” You can find the brief online here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A587/335380/20241217144322392_24A587%20TikTok%20v%20Garland%20Amicus%20Brief%20pdfa.pdf -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Religious Liberty
ACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter IslamophobiaACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter Islamophobia
WASHINGTON – The Biden administration today released the first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia and related forms of bias and discrimination, including hate against Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans. In advance of the strategy, American Civil Liberties Union and its partners had urged the administration to overhaul government programs that reflect anti-Muslim discrimination. In particular, we have called for urgent action to constrain governmental agencies from continuing to exercise their authorities and technology to wrongly surveil and investigate, watchlist, and question and detain Muslims at the border, as well as deny immigration benefits to people from Muslim-majority countries. While the White House raised expectations that many of these issues would be addressed, the final strategy ended up falling far short. The following is a statement from Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project: “While this strategy acknowledges discrimination and its harms, it does little to end them and is a squandered opportunity. For decades, American officials have invoked national security to pass laws and implement programs that disproportionately harm Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim. A serious anti-discrimination strategy would concretely address multiple bias-infused government practices that deny our communities equal participation in civic life and our democracy, like federal watchlisting, surveillance, and investigation. We’re profoundly frustrated that the administration didn’t take even the basic, overdue step of recognizing that anti-Muslim discrimination is uniquely normalized and embedded in government policies.” -
VirginiaDec 2024
National Security
Trabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted ManTrabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted Man
Our client, Nizar Trabelsi, is in the United States against his will. The federal government brought him here from Belgium more than a decade ago and charged him with terrorism-related crimes. At trial, the government’s case failed: a federal jury found Mr. Trabelsi not guilty. But instead of allowing Mr. Trabelsi to return to Belgium after his acquittal, the United States placed him in highly restrictive immigration detention and began an ongoing effort to force him to Tunisia, where he was born and where he will very likely be tortured. Mr. Trabelsi’s detention violates the Constitution, immigration law, and the extradition treaty between the United States and Belgium. Through this lawsuit, he seeks to return to Belgium, and he demands an immediate improvement of his detention conditions.