[halJordan]

There was a great piece published back during the Patriot Act debates where a princeton or harvard professor used modern math techniques and tavern records to triangulate for arrest the early Patriots and their meeting spots. It was a great article.

[guzfip]

Got a link to this? Sounds like a fun read.

[sdoering]

Not OP, but here you go.

OP had it slightly wrong though: it's not tavern records but membership lists of colonial Boston organizations, and the author is a sociology professor (Kieran Healy), not from Princeton or Harvard.

He uses basic social network analysis on historical membership data to identify Paul Revere as the key figure among 254 colonists using nothing but "metadata." The whole thing is written as a satirical report by a British intelligence analyst in the 1770s, which makes it a pretty effective commentary on the "it's just metadata" argument from the NSA debates.

Link: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

[ambicapter]

Isn't he also making the point that's a very effective way to triangulate the leaders of an org? That's just going to reinforce the NSA's inclination to do so.

[ethersteeds]

I think the argument is that NSA already knows exactly how valuable metadata is, while the average person significantly underestimates its importance without a concrete demonstration.

[xorcist]

The same NSA that publicly states "We kill people over metadata"?

If that's the type of things they say publicly at conferences we can only imagine what a more sensitive comment would look like. How anyone can underestimate the importance of that is beyond me.

[johnthescott]

spread a false story in public news and monitor cell call graphs.