My Tuesday column begins like so:
Let’s review. Yes, if you’re a cellphone user subscribed to one the major carriers, NSA probably collected your metadata in its ongoing effort to find out what terrorists are up to. That is, per a FISA court warrant, NSA might have a list of numbers you dialed, along with numbers that happened to have dialed you and the duration of those calls. No proper names or content of the calls are retained. If you’re not calling terrorists in Yemen or wherever, NSA doesn’t care about your metadata and likely destroyed it.
Likewise, with the cooperation of your email ISP (Google, Yahoo and others), there’s a chance NSA has done the same thing with your emails or Facebook messages. Again, they might’ve attained the “to” and “from” — the metadata. No content was collected, and the metadata was encrypted to hide your name, and unless you’re talking to terrorist targets earmarked for surveillance, your metadata was likely destroyed.
And yet, while a too-large chunk of the leftosphere continues to gather outside the White House with digital torches and Twitter-pitchforks demanding the arrest and prosecution of the president for overseeing the acquisition of infinitesimally less personal data than is collected, analysed and distributed by your credit card company or health insurance provider, the Republican Party continues to pass laws that go far beyond anything the most sinister surveillance hawks could ever come up with.
On Friday, Wisconsin’s tea party governor, Scott Walker, signed the state’s very own anti-abortion law. [READ ON]