Metadata ownership, transparency, and privacy

As recent massive leaks of classified data by NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed, the U.S. government is taking advantage of previous court rulings that metadata shared with a third party carries no reasonable expectation of privacy to conduct upstream taps of telephone and web traffic metadata. With computer storage costs plummeting and processing speeds continue to curve upward, it has become feasible to capture massive amounts of metadata and to search it for patterns useful in anticipating terror attacks, locating enemies of the state overseas, and prosecuting computer network related crime. This process only works well if everyone’s metadata is available and if those being investigated are unaware of the metadata they are producing. This creates a legal system and by extension a society with asymmetric transparency. Is this desirable? Digital humanities is an emerging discipline that is heavily invested in the creation and use of metadata. More than that, digital humanists just grok metadata. That makes us qualified to participate in the conversation about metadata privacy. This talk would be an opportunity to consider what role digital humanities scholars could or should play in the transparency policy debates.