Rob Graham posted some insightful thoughts on his blog regarding why he is opposed to meta-data surveillance by the NSA. I mostly agree with his sentiment, but I had to challenge him on one point. He wrote:

The issue that is important to me is the same sort of issue that provoked the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Britain had repealed the onerous taxes, all except the insignificant tax on tea. The reason the colonists rebelled was not because of the amount of money, which was tiny, but because "taxation without representation" was an intolerable philosophical idea. It meant that the colonists were "subjects" to be exploited by Britain, and not "free citizens" of the realm.

The same thing is true here with the Section 215 collection of phone records. In truth, the impact on citizens is insignificant and there are extensive safeguards to prevent this from being abused. None of that matters to me, as it's still surveillance of innocent citizens suspecedt of no crime. It subjugates us, and is an intolerable infringement on a free person's rights.

Is the impact on citizens really insignificant?

First, I'm not sure that the claim that there are "extensive safeguards" is credible. For years we've been told that they weren't collecting meta-data at all. Now we're being told that meta-data is being collected, but there are extensive safeguards. If the first claim was false, why does the second claim have credibility? By whose standards are the safeguards considered "extensive?"

Second, I'm not sure that the claim that they're only collecting meta-data is credible. The Wall Street Journal reported that the content of all email and text messages sent in the Salt Lake City area during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games was monitored. That is not meta-data and none of the legal arguments about meta-data apply to it. Are they still collecting content now? If they denied doing so, would those denials be credible?

Third, I'm not sure that meta-data collection has an insignificant impact on citizens. Everytime you call someone, the government has a record. That record is kept. They claim that they only keep it for five years, but that could be a lie, or the record retention time could change at any point during that five year period into a longer retention time, and that change could occur without any public announcement. If, for any reason in the future, the person you are contacting comes under suspicion, either by this government, or by a future government that is more aggressive than this one, you are better off not making that call. If the person you are contacting is either a political activist or a criminal of any sort, your association with them could lead to assumptions being made about you by the authorities. Maybe the current restrictions make it unlikely that this association would be observed by the authorities, but if the rules for accessing the data change in the future, you won't get the opportunity to go back and delete the record. Therefore, reasonable people may choose to limit the exercise of their right to freedom of association as a consequence of meta-data retention.

Concluding that the impact on associational liberty is insignificant understates the importance of a fundamental Constitutional right.

Is the impact of meta-data surveillance on citizens really insignificant?