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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | On June 5, 2013, the Guardian published a confidential Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”) Order, care of Edward Snowden, requiring Verizon to hand over to the National Security Agency telephony metadata generated from its users.1 In response, President Barack Obama released a carefully worded statement: “[N]obody is listening to your calls. That’s not what this program’s about… But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.”2 | |
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< | On the surface, the President’s words are both an appeal to the American public’s basic Fourth Amendment sensibilities and a legal maneuver to remove the NSA’s surveillance activities outside the standard of “reasonable expectation of privacy”. However, underneath, Mr. Obama’s deliberate focus on Fourth Amendment principles steers public attention away from the more horrifying aspect of Mr. Snowden’s exposé: that the U.S. government’s most effective surveillance tools are telecommunications and technology companies such as Verizon, Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn? , Facebook, Apple, and Yahoo (“TTC”) already engaged in the aggregation of personal information through means that easily evade Fourth Amendment protections and, much worse, public scrutiny. | >
> | On the surface, the President’s words are both an appeal to the American public’s basic Fourth Amendment3 sensibilities and a legal maneuver to remove the NSA’s surveillance activities outside the standard of “reasonable expectation of privacy”4. However, underneath, Mr. Obama’s deliberate focus on Fourth Amendment principles steers public attention away from the more horrifying aspect of Mr. Snowden’s exposé: that the U.S. government’s most effective surveillance tools are telecommunications and technology companies such as Verizon, Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn? , Facebook, Apple, and Yahoo (“TTC”) already engaged in the aggregation of personal information through means that easily evade Fourth Amendment protections and, much worse, public scrutiny. | | | A. Metadata and Reasonable Expectations of Privacy | |
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< | When the President contrasted “listening to your calls” from the term “metadata”, he impliedly invoked the government’s almost four-decades-old U.S v. Miller argument: that information voluntarily disclosed to third parties does not enjoy reasonable expectations of privacy. Metadata (“data about data”) falls within this category for two reasons: first, when viewed separately, it represents “seemingly innocuous data points” far less substantive compared to the contents of private conversations. | >
> | When the President contrasted “listening to your calls” from the term “metadata”, he impliedly invoked the government’s almost four-decades-old U.S v. Miller5 argument: that information voluntarily disclosed to third parties does not enjoy reasonable expectations of privacy. The relevance of this doctrine Metadata (“data about data”) falls within this category for two reasons: first, when viewed separately, it represents “seemingly innocuous data points”6 far less substantive compared to the contents of private conversations. | | |
This won't fly. The contents of the call are disclosed to the carrier in precisely the same way that the "metadata" are. There's no difference between the envelope and the message, they're just bits on the company's net. Your argument cannot be right because it proves too much. | | | B. What Happens at the Back-End? | |
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< | The value of metadata to U.S. surveillance becomes apparent when it is aggregated on a large scale and used to ferret out hidden facts about a data source through sophisticated analysis. Data derived from consumer purchases, social networks, Internet Protocol addresses and similar records can expose intimate details about a person’s life, his activities and even his identity. In fact, it can “reveal who we are, who we know, what we do and care about and plan to do next”. It can even “reveal things that we never intentionally communicated at all.” This revelatory potential is what makes metadata appealing to government surveillance. But this is not even the worst part of Mr. Snowden’s story. | >
> | The value of metadata to U.S. surveillance becomes apparent when it is aggregated on a large scale and used to ferret out hidden facts about a data source through sophisticated analysis. Data derived from consumer purchases, social networks, Internet Protocol addresses and similar records can expose intimate details about a person’s life, his activities and even his identity.7 In fact, it can “reveal who we are, who we know, what we do and care about and plan to do next”.8 It can even “reveal things that we never intentionally communicated at all.”9 This revelatory potential is what makes metadata appealing to government surveillance. But this is not even the worst part of Mr. Snowden’s story. | | |
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