De Amerikaanse posterijen registreren alle brieven

Eigenlijk is het heel logisch, maar toch hè, maar toch...
De New York Times schreef eergisteren over het Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program: de US Postal Service maakt blijkbaar een foto van de voor en achterkant van alle poststukken die ze verwerken. Het gaat hierbij om ongeveer 160 miljard (!) enveloppen. Het is niet bekend hoe lang de foto's daarna bewaard worden.

The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service to retrace the path of mail at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping.
“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, who started a computer crimes unit in the fraud section of the criminal division of the Justice Department and worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be, ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”

En het gaat natuurlijk om de metadata:

“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.

Dat die metagegevens heel interessant en veelzeggend kunnen zijn, heb ik zaterdag al beschreven.
Maar het plaatje hierboven is wat dat betreft ook interessant. Het is een weergave van de relaties van Jacob Goldstein, van NPR, enkel gebaseerd op zijn Gmail-metadata:

The relationships it maps are, more or less, my life — orange circles for Planet Money, purple for Brooklyn, brown for college. The big red circle that gets cut off at the bottom of the screengrab is my mom.
The picture shows just how revealing metadata can be. Without knowing anything about the content of my emails, you can paint a pretty complete picture of my personal and professional universe.

Het plaatje is gemaakt met het programmaatje Immersion van MIT:

Once you log in, Immersion will use only the From, To, Cc and Timestamp fields of the emails in the account you are signing in with. It will not access the subject or the body content of any of your emails.
Upon logging out of Immersion, you will be presented with a choice to save or delete your data, which contains your compressed email metadata and user profile.

Heel confronterend, zeker als je het combineert met bijvoorbeeld je LinkedIn-contacten.

Gerelateerd
Dat metadata niet zo onschuldig zijn