Governments are fond of telling us not to worry about their wholesale collection of phone records because, after all, it’s just metadata. Mike Rogers even tried to press the point that since the records contained only phone numbers they couldn’t be tied back to people. It appears that even the CIA underestimated the danger of metadata.
Matthew Cole, an NBC news producer, gave a Black Hat talk on how dangerous metadata can be. You really need to watch the video (it’s 25 minutes) but the TL;DR is that
- The Italians authorities were able to discover and prove that the CIA was behind the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric and Italian citizen by an analysis of cell phone metadata.
- The entire CIA network in Lebanon was rolled up the same way.
The salient point is that none of this required sophisticated analysis or special tools (although such tools were used).
Cole makes the point that—as the CIA found out to its chagrin—metadata can be extremely revealing; often more revealing than the actual content of the calls. Watch the video to see this in action. It will probably surprise you how devastating and revealing metadata can be. If you’re at all concerned about your privacy you must watch this video.