Jennifer Rubin Seems Confused.
Follow TLR on Google+
During his CPAC 2014 speech, Senator Rand Paul said “I think we need to do a little more spying on the Russians and a lot less spying on Americans.” The remark upset Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who responded with a column titled “Rand Paul seems confused.”
“The National Security Agency does not… ‘spy’ on the content of communications absent individualized suspicion,” Rubin retorted. “They collect metadata.”
The same day that Rubin’s words appeared in the Washington Post, however, Stanford researchers released a paper detailing everything that can be learned from “metadata.” The list they compiled can scarcely be described as “meta” anything. Instead, it includes myriad intimate details about individuals.
“Phone metadata is unambiguously sensitive, even over a small sample and short time window,” said the researchers. “We were able to infer medical conditions, firearm ownership and more, using solely phone metadata.”
They found that the data “can yield a wealth of detail about family, political, professional, religious and sexual associations.”
In defending the NSA’s nationwide surveillance program last year, President Obama correctly observed that “You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy.” Americans may want to ask themselves whether 100 percent security is something they ever wanted in the first place.
