The Obama administration for over two years allowed the National
Security Agency to collect enormous amounts of metadata on email usage
by Americans, according to one of the latest leaks of government
documents by the now-famous whistleblower Edward J Snowden.
But what is e-mail metadata anyway? It's information about the people you're sending emails to and receiving emails from, and the times that the messages were sent — as opposed to the contents of the messages. It's the digital equivalent of a postal service worker looking at your mail envelope instead of opening it up and reading what's inside.
That sounds harmless, but it turns out your email metadata can be used to connect the dots of your life story. I learned this from participating in Immersion, a project by MIT's Media Laboratory. Immersion is a tool that mines your email metadata and automatically stitches it all together into an interactive graphic. The result is a creepy spider web showing all the people you've corresponded with, how they know each other, and who your closest friends and professional partners are.
After entering my Google mail credentials, Immersion took five minutes to stitch together metadata from emails going back eight years. A quick glimpse at my results gives an accurate description of my life.
In an Immersion chart, each person is represented by dots. The more you've emailed with the person, the bigger the dot gets. In my results, the biggest dot was my boss at my last job; the second biggest was my long-term former girlfriend. The medium-size ones were some of my closest friends. Lines that connected some dots showed friends of mine who knew each other.
Texas has become the first US state to ban email snooping without a warrant.
Governor Rick Perry signed the new privacy bill - HB 2268 - into law on Friday. It went into effect immediately.
The bill enacts a law that sets Texas residents apart from the other 49 states by protecting them from state and local law enforcement surveillance carried out without a warrant.
The portion of the bill that pertains to privacy was written by 29-year-old freshman Republican legislator Jonathan Stickland, who represents an area between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Stickland told the Star-Telegram that he's fighting for ideals that all US citizens can get behind - a sentiment the newspaper applauded:
After it's open, sitting around in an inbox, it's been fair game. Ditto if the email has been left unopened in an inbox for 180 days.
The Department of Justice for the first time acknowledged in March that maintaining different legal standards for finely aged email is an outdated notion, supporting revisions to ECPA.
In the meantime, as we wait for revisions to ECPA, the residents of 49 US states are subject to a lower level of privacy than the Lone Star State.
That's a nickname granted to Texas, some say, to signify that it's a former independent republic, as well as a reminder of the state's struggle for independence from Mexico.
Let's hope that 49 other states follow the privacy path pointed out by that star.
But what is e-mail metadata anyway? It's information about the people you're sending emails to and receiving emails from, and the times that the messages were sent — as opposed to the contents of the messages. It's the digital equivalent of a postal service worker looking at your mail envelope instead of opening it up and reading what's inside.
That sounds harmless, but it turns out your email metadata can be used to connect the dots of your life story. I learned this from participating in Immersion, a project by MIT's Media Laboratory. Immersion is a tool that mines your email metadata and automatically stitches it all together into an interactive graphic. The result is a creepy spider web showing all the people you've corresponded with, how they know each other, and who your closest friends and professional partners are.
After entering my Google mail credentials, Immersion took five minutes to stitch together metadata from emails going back eight years. A quick glimpse at my results gives an accurate description of my life.
In an Immersion chart, each person is represented by dots. The more you've emailed with the person, the bigger the dot gets. In my results, the biggest dot was my boss at my last job; the second biggest was my long-term former girlfriend. The medium-size ones were some of my closest friends. Lines that connected some dots showed friends of mine who knew each other.
Texas has become the first US state to ban email snooping without a warrant.
Governor Rick Perry signed the new privacy bill - HB 2268 - into law on Friday. It went into effect immediately.
The bill enacts a law that sets Texas residents apart from the other 49 states by protecting them from state and local law enforcement surveillance carried out without a warrant.
The portion of the bill that pertains to privacy was written by 29-year-old freshman Republican legislator Jonathan Stickland, who represents an area between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Stickland told the Star-Telegram that he's fighting for ideals that all US citizens can get behind - a sentiment the newspaper applauded:
“Despite the many differences between Tea Party Republicans like Stickland and the most liberal weenies you might find in Austin, there also tend to be some similarities.As Ars Technica's Cyrus Farivar points out, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) requires federal law enforcement to get a warrant only to access email that hasn't yet been opened by its recipient.
"One of them is that whatever government does, it should do in the open. There can be arguments over exactly what government transparency is, but both liberals and Tea Partiers tend to be for it."
After it's open, sitting around in an inbox, it's been fair game. Ditto if the email has been left unopened in an inbox for 180 days.
The Department of Justice for the first time acknowledged in March that maintaining different legal standards for finely aged email is an outdated notion, supporting revisions to ECPA.
In the meantime, as we wait for revisions to ECPA, the residents of 49 US states are subject to a lower level of privacy than the Lone Star State.
That's a nickname granted to Texas, some say, to signify that it's a former independent republic, as well as a reminder of the state's struggle for independence from Mexico.
Let's hope that 49 other states follow the privacy path pointed out by that star.
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