NSA: No Suprise America

Watching the twitter sphere explode with indignation over revelations that the NSA has been collecting all the metadata for everyone's internet data -- and probably recording all the actual data, so they can mine it if they want -- is no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention. In fact, the biggest problem is that it looks to me like people have to work pretty hard to whip up indignation since anyone with a clue has been indignant about the situation since the original Patriot Act was hustled through congress. People who've understood what was going on have indignation fatigue.

There have been a lot of good comments about the situation -- I liked Rick Falkvinge's post Told You So, which pretty much nails it. As usual @DaveWiner has many insightful comments. I particularly liked this one: "Knowing what they knew, Zuck, Page and Costolo could have helped us all decentralize. They didn't. Another angle for the @arrington crusade."

There aren't any purely technical solutions to the problem, but there are two approaches that help. One is to only share encrypted data with third parties and the other is to provide your own services. It's probably worth pursuing both strategies where feasible. Neither approach, however, addresses the central issue here: the metadata produced as the byproduct of interactions with corporations.

There aren't any simple political solutions either. We need to work assiduously to push back both against the legal framework the government uses to collect the metadata and the ability of corporations to collect and retain metadata about people. Perhaps we need a "do not retain metadata" list, like the "do not call" list, where people could opt out of having data collected about them. It might be a popular program, but it would make it hard to earn a degree or get a loan.