> WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end-encrypted, but it's not open-source
And explicitly does not encrypt metadata.
Meanwhile NSA top brass publicly stated, "We kill people based on metadata."
And explicitly does not encrypt metadata.
Meanwhile NSA top brass publicly stated, "We kill people based on metadata."
Does make you wonder what kind of people they kill or how many. I can't think of a lot of crimes whose metadata warrants being killed for personally.
You're (literally) missing links then. If A is a high-value target that we look at closely (because they're a high-value target), what if B frequently contacts A? If C, D, and E always recieve messages from B immediately following A messaging B?
What about times? Is B messaging F at a consistant time, and never outside of that? Is A only messaging G, at a set time, with G's phone immediately being put into (ineffective) airplane mode immediately before and after?
Facebook built their business on the social graph, but the CIA's been at this for decades
The FBI has been much quieter about this though - there has yet to be a Snowden-for-the-FBI, though they would be one of the agencies I would fully expect to be doing similar work domestically.
As this becomes more well-known, I would expect state and county police to start looking into data and metadata as well. In some cases, they already are [0] - even if some aspects of that case are less relevant today (Google Maps no longer uploads location history, though cell tower trilateration is getting more accurate, not less).
It's far more prevalent than most people realize, though I invite you to consider which you'd rather have when building a second-by-second profile of a person's life: the message contents, or the metadata?
Can someone post a link to that?