PRISM and Me

Nothing that calls itself "news" is complete today without offering something about the NSA's project (called PRISM) to gather information about telephone and internet traffic.  My ears perked up when I heard the term "metadata".  Call me a geek or a wonk, but data has been where I lived for the past thirty years. 

Getting anyone at all to pay attention to something called metadata has been harder than making the average person care about mathematics or history.  Now that it's out there in the public vocabulary, its use brings up several other issues.

1. The use of the term seems calculated to disarm suspicion.  It's just metadata about your communications and not the communications themselves so don't get your underwear in a knot.
2. The term is used in a way that is inappropriate to the issue.  It wouldn't matter to the issue of government intrusion if it was the actual communications that were being monitored.
3. I heard a man on a call-in show the other day talking about "my information" as though he were the owner of the information merely because it concerned something that he did.
4. There has been much discussion of exchanging privacy for security.  That discussion is moot when the privacy being discussed extends only to data.  If there is anything at all to be learned from cyber-bullying or phishing scams or on-line impersonations it is that the information itself has no value.  It is only the use to which the information is applied that has any ethical or moral value.  I realize that this is the same argument advanced by gun control opponents but on this, at least, they have a valid point.  THERE IS NO PRIVACY.  THERE IS NO SECURITY.  There is only more (or less) private and more (or less) secure.
5. Finally (for this post) the term metadata is defined in these reports as data about data.  This is semantic sleight of hand.  What is data and what is data about that data shifts as we go from person to person or perspective to perspective.  ATT and Verizon do not record calls (we hope) so the information being gathered by the NSA is data and NOT metadata.  The information is what the communications companies use for billing purposes.  Yes, from the perspective of the caller or the callee, this could be thought of as metadata if they thought of it at all prior to PRISM but here is a case in which a new piece of knowledge (or data) causes the world to recognize something that never existed before--namely metadata about their communications.

Is the government (in the person of an agency, NSA, tasked with National Security through application of electronic rather than human resources) acting legally?  Given that the government defines "legal", the answer has to be "Hah!"  This is what the NSA does on a worldwide basis though not usually by coercing companies into handing over information.  Would the answer be any different if the NSA hacked the corporate servers that store all of this communication-related data?

Bottom line: if situations like this one are the only time we pay attention, we deserve whatever happens.