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So when they decide to target you, they can actually recreate your exact steps. With a metro card and a credit card alone. Like, literally where you go, and where you buy, and potentially by linking that data with other people on similar travel plans, they can figure out who you talk to and who you met with. When you then take cell−phone data which logs your location, and you link up purchasing data, metro card data, and your debit card, you start to get what you could call metadata: an aggregate over a person’s life. In metadata, aggregate is content. It tells a story about you, which is made up of facts, but it’s not necessarily true. So, for example, just because you were on the corner and all those data point to it, it doesn’t mean you committed the crime. So, it’s important to note that if someone has a perception that you have done a thing, he will now follow you for the rest of your life. So, just keep in mind that what happens to you guys, for example, with your fingerprints, and retins scans, and photographs, that is what is going to happen to people, in the future, when they resist policy changes, and when they try to protest, in a totally constitutionally protected way.» Jacob Appelbaum, encryption and security software developer and journalist, speaking at the Digital Anti−Repression Workshop on Surveillance, from Democracy Now!
«I feel that it’s important to testify about what’s really going on behind the scenes in the intelligence communities around the world. Not just in NSA. All these programs that Edward Snowden has exposed fundamentally are ways of acquiring information. Every dictatorship down through history has always done that. One of the first things they need to do is to try to acquire knowledge of their population, and that’s exactly what these programs do. I see this as the most major threat to our democracies all around the world.» William Binney, testifying as expert witness in a 2014 German parliamentary inquiry to investigate NSA spying

Overflight