Tell-all telephone – Six months of phone metadata visualized
The argument isn't that meta-data can't be used to get a lot of information about someone. The argument is that in the U.S., meta-data isn't protected information. Call meta-data is not your information, but information the telephone company keeps about you. In the U.S., the 4th amendment does not protect those sorts of records: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland</a>. Your cell phone, which you use voluntarily, gives the phone company tremendous information about you, and under U.S. law nothing keeps the government from getting that information from the phone company.<p>Does call meta-data give the government a lot of information? Yes. Does it give the government too much information? Quite possibly. But arguing shrilly about how collecting call meta-data is "illegal" is counter-productive. Maybe it should be illegal, but you can't start the process of making it so by proceeding from an incorrect premise. And you can't dismiss the goal of making it illegal, by arguing that the government is already ignoring the law, with reference to activity where the government is clearly attempting to stay within the law, even if it is pushing the boundaries as much as it can.