Glenn Greenwald talking:
Collecting metadata is the supreme priority of the agency, not because it protects people’s privacy, but precisely because it enables the NSA to invade people’s privacy more effectively than the interception of content. And I think sometimes it’s difficult to understand that in the abstract, but it’s easy to understand it when concrete examples are used.
And so, if you can imagine, for example, a woman who decides that she wants to get an abortion. If you’re listening in on her phone call, what you will hear is her calling the clinic. The clinic will answer with a generic-sounding name, like Eastside Clinic or something like that. You will hear the woman who you’ve decided to target for surveillance ask for an appointment Tuesday at 2:00, get an appointment Tuesday at 2:00, and then hang up the phone. And you’ll have no idea why she called or even what kind of clinic she called or what the purpose was. But if you’re collecting her metadata, you will see the phone number that she called. You will then be able to identify it as an abortion clinic. You will know how many times she called that clinic. And you will have exactly the information that you wouldn’t get if you were simply listening to her phone call.
Kirk Wiebe talking:
It is true that in terms of speed and comprehension, comprehensiveness, if you will, metadata provides an opportunity to assess the activities of a targeted person or entity much more rapidly, and therefore—and because it’s machinable. The world operates on metadata. It is exactly how data is moved. When you dial a phone number—we say dial—when we punch up a phone number, instantly almost, the other end is ringing the person intended to receive the call. This is true of email: In seconds, it arrives at the person’s inbox—when things are working right. So, the opportunity for speed and comprehension of what a targeted entity is doing is enormous.
And especially if you watch it daily over time, you can actually then begin to paint a picture of a person’s lifestyle, where they are, because it’s not just phone calls. It’s bank deposits. It’s credit card swipes at the gas station, at the flower shop, when a man’s on the way home and buys flowers for his wife. It’s the E-ZPass transponder that measures or knows what ramp you got on a toll road. You amass this data. You have time hacks of every place an individual is when they do those things. So every time that you touch an electronic system, there’s droppings left. There’s a record that can be exploited.
— source democracynow.org
Kirk Wiebe, retired official from the National Security Agency, where he worked for more than 32 years. He received the NSA’s second-highest award, the Meritorious Civilian Service Award; the director of CIA’s Meritorious Unit Award; and a Letter of Commendation from the secretary of the Air Force, among other awards. He was an NSA whistleblower on matters of privacy involving massive electronic surveillance.
[Just after Snowden leak, Obama said they are simply collecting metadata, not your phone calls. Actually thats all they want.]