metadata |ˈmetəˌdatə, -ˌdātə|
noun
a set of data that describes and gives information about other data

In effect per the NSA usage, the gathered information you would use to create an outline of someone’s interests, activities and networking. You don’t need the details to accomplish the preceding.

One likely reason why the NSA scoops up metadata can be found in the technique employed in open source intelligence analysis.

Performing open source intelligence analysis isn’t rocket science. An analogy would be it is assembling many bits of information to complete a jig-saw puzzle. The main complication is, you have to draw your puzzle pieces from a large source with the parts of many puzzles mixed together. How this complication is overcome is, by compiling threads of metadata.

By following the many threads specific to the subject you’re analyzing, you build a metadata base. Within this base there will be many bias, 1) some socially/culturally shaped bias & 2) other, deliberate disinformation bias. Intelligence agencies and other players (e.g. corporate entities) will play on the former, to create a false picture with the latter.

With an understanding of the first, you act on knowledge of the second, to defeat the many false leads. The Achilles heel of the second is, example given, FOX reports a fact of Dick Cheney & Alberto Gonzales had been indicted by a grand jury in Texas, for racketeering having to do with the private prisons for profit industry. You understand FOX is into disinformation and will falsely report on the facts surrounding the indictment but in fact they’ve provided metadata (the indictment) is useful in assembling a separate focus on the criminal nature of a Dick Cheney-Alberto Gonzales criminal enterprise. Following the many metadata threads of criminal personalities like Cheney and his several associates, enables assembling a puzzle and bringing focus to the larger, actual portrait, of a criminal actor’s endeavors. You didn’t need many of the details, subject to spin, beneath the metadata, to develop an accurate narrative or portrait of events per a criminal enterprise in relation to scope and activity.

Now, let’s reverse this scenario and give the criminals the initiative, and as well, a large metadata advantage where there are few metadata disinformation threads to be sifted out, to arrive at a focus.

With the metadata of the entire American people (email headers, website visits, phone records) and a relevant computer program for analysis of specific subjects, the NSA could profile, quite accurately and rapidly, to determine exactly who is interested in what and why. Additionally, what the NSA, per se, indeed does with our metadata could be nearly besides the point. Why? Because you only need to look at who has the benefit of and could do analysis quite independently with access to the NSA data, or that is to say the literally millions of security cleared operatives of whom a large swath happen to be in private contracting. Just look at what Snowden had access to from within a private corporation and he states he avoided collecting large amounts of sensitive information, not only was appalled at fellow employees sharing naked photos of ‘hot’ young women who thought they were only sharing their photos with boyfriends. It’s not a stretch to say within this corrupt environment, if Monsanto or Chevron wanted anti-corporate activists analyzed for purposes of illegally undermining their work, whether with blackmail or in extreme instance, assassination, the corporations would likely be able to acquire whatever information they liked.

Back to the NSA itself, it doesn’t hurt to remind people this is a Pentagon run entity and our Pentagon is chock full of, and led by, what the civil rights organization Military Religious Freedom Foundation describes as “Christian Taliban.” This is a Pentagon where it is clearly and pointedly and repeatedly demonstrated they will not follow the laws governing the military when it comes to protecting Christian fundamentalist generals breaking those laws and undermining our constitutional order, so how could anyone, ever, expect the NSA would play by the rules they claim are in force to protect the lot of us? A clearer case of ‘caveat emptor’ was never in the cards.

Now, what do you suppose Dick Cheney and associates had in mind when KBR corporation was contracted to build ‘FEMA Disaster Camps’ across the USA (carried on & expanded under the Obama administration) and how that would play with the preceding illustration drawn for you? It makes me laugh when liberals think the 2nd Amendment should be done away with, because if there were a post ‘disaster’ extra-constitutional military junta in the USA, other than a large handful of honest old line conservatives, the majority of candidates for incarceration are likely already profiled and they will largely include those most effective progressive, anti-corporate activists (excepting those gatekeepers whose materials you’ll often find in so-called ‘alternative media’ such as TomDispatch and the Daily Beast, examples given.)

In conclusion, people should pay closer attention to the NSA’s controlling entity, the CIA special operations fused Pentagon, staffed by Christian Taliban. These fused entities, having been exposed as telling too many false stories to list in the single case of the so-called ‘Bin Ladin raid’, have now released Bin Ladin’s ‘reading list’ or the materials owned by a man who may or not have been alive since 2002 and the last reliable information on someone requiring regular dialysis.

Now, the CIA fused Pentagon wants you to believe the ghost of Bin Ladin was into 9/11 conspiracies. All this should really tell you is; this is information the Pentagon views as highly threatening and wants discredited with guilt by association. Why? Read it right here:

Fear of Minor Debris

And never forget the Pentagon is not only fused with the CIA, as well the Pentagon owns the NSA. You just had a read of this article and you’ve just been recorded for the Christian Taliban. Count on it.

“Mr. Snowden has brought home to us that, while we Americans do not yet live in a police state or tyranny, we are well along in building the infrastructure on which either could be instantly erected if our leaders decided to do so.  No longer protected by the law, our freedoms now depend on the self-restraint of men and women in authority, many of them in uniform.  History protests that if one builds a turnkey totalitarian state, those who hold the keys will eventually turn them” -former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman

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Related:

Alfreda Bikowsky & the Definition of Stupid