NSA Honcho: We Kill People on the Basis of Metadata, but You Can Trust Us with Yours

NSA Honcho: We Kill People on the Basis of Metadata, but You Can Trust Us with Yours: I’m completely flabbergasted that someone would offer such an admission as a defense of the NSA as if it could possibly reassure Americans. For months and months we heard that the NSA spying was no big deal because they only sucked up “the metadata” of all those phone calls. How important can the metadata be if they aren’t (as they claim) collecting the content of those calls. Important enough to use to decide whether or not to kill people! From the ABC News blog we get a report on the statement of General Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency.

Hayden made the remark after saying he agreed with the idea that metadata – the information collected by the NSA about phone calls and other communications that does not include content – can tell the government “everything” about anyone it’s targeting for surveillance, often making the actual content of the communication unnecessary.

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