Why the NSA tracking of metadata is a problem

Just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean you have nothing to fear.

I said that, or expressed that sentiment in slightly different words back in the early days of PGP[1] when I posted something controversial on Usenet[2]. I did a digital sign so that no one could mis-quote me and claim I said (or meant) something else.

To me there are two issues involved in the NSA monitoring, (1) that they do it at all without a warrant for the individuals involved, and (2) that they did it in secret.

The fact that they do this at all bothers me, I'm sure there are some people in other countries who follow my tweets, or Google+, or otherwise can be associated with me, and I would rather not become unable to get a security clearance if I ever need one again. Are some of them of interest because they are in the wrong place? Who knows? But I bet Abdul in Iran is more interesting than Reginald in Britain, the NSA is free to use stereotypes.

The thing which makes me want to yell "how dare they" is keeping this whole program hidden from the public. While the public didn't know this was going on, certainly employees of telcos knew it existed, if not the details. It was gossip back in the 2005-2008 time frame, about the time I left the company then known as at&t. The public didn't know, but I don't see how the bad guys could have been fooled, people working on it, or near enough to physically observe, didn't have security clearances. Therefore I have to conclude that the reason for keeping the program(s) out of the public eye were political rather than operational. If I knew about it with no effort, how could the competent enemies (the ones who might do serious damage) not know. It wasn't until a report from England based on leaked papers that the public became aware that their government was doing things which make 1984 (the novel) look like casual oversight.

So I think that while the implementation details of programs such as these need to be secret, I think their existence should be public. The public should be aware that tracking is possible, what programs are in use, and what use can be made of the data collected. Can a wife get the data to track her possibly cheating husband? Does the government track every car in the USA by reading the RFID chips in the tires? Should the public know that every toll booth on an Interstate records the license number and takes a picture of the driver? [3]

As for Mr Snowden, is he a Patriot, a Traitor, or an Idealist? A topic for another day.

[1] Pretty Good Privacy, early form of GPG encryption and signing.
[2] A predecessor of ARPA net (which became the Internet) which used the UUCP transfer protocol and a "flood fill" distribution implementation which didn't require the source and destination to be connected at the same time. Think store and forward.
[3] Google "Peter Porko" for details on how that evidence was used to convict his murderer.