Letters: With the NSA, spying made easy

Re “The metadata ‘menace,’” Opinion, Jan. 26

Jack Riley purports to explain metadata, dismissing concerns about the National Security Agency’s massive collection program. He misses the point.

Here’s the real issue: Metadata is designed to be easy for a computer to process. Anybody who has battled a corporate voice-response system knows how hard it is for a computer to understand human speech. If the NSA were merely tapping phones, it would only be able to spy on a few people and would be forced to concentrate on the real threats.

But computer-friendly metadata can be processed rapidly and automatically. That means the government can trawl through millions of calls in a few seconds, whether looking for the rare terrorist or just seeking political advantage.

And that’s the problem: Metadata makes blanket surveillance easy. Any former East German can tell you where that leads.

Geoff Kuenning

Claremont

The writer is a professor of computer science at Harvey Mudd College.

To Riley, Americans’ concern with the NSA’s collection of metadata is partly caused by a misunderstanding of what metadata is and is not.

He writes that the NSA records “the direction (who called whom), length, date and time” but not “the location or the name associated with a call.” But names and phone numbers are just labels. What generally can be done with one set can be done with the other, and it is a simple matter to connect them.

Without verifiably effective safeguards, a distinction between the two is a distinction without a difference.

Riley describes safeguards to prevent misuse of the collected metadata — safeguards shown to be sufficiently one-sided as to be suspect.

If, then, we are to trust, we also need to be able to verify that our constitutional rights are not unnecessarily violated.

Bernard Springer

Encino

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