Metadata Quotes

Metadata equals surveillance; it's that simple.

Metadata liberates us, liberates knowledge.

ISIS is the most sophisticated terror threat we have ever faced. We are now at a time when we need more tools, not less tools. And that took we lost, the metadata program, was a valuable tool that we no longer have at our disposal.

To a collector of curios, the dust is metadata.

Any time someone tries to tell you that metadata is 'meaningless, don't worry, it's just who you call, it's just phone records, it's not a big deal' - realize we kill people based on metadata. So they must be pretty darn certain that they think they know something based on metadata.

When we miss with all the metadata collection we've had, the San Bernardino couple and the Tsarnaev brothers, what that suggests to me is that we are using the wrong algorithms to search through all this data.

We have a lot of argument about laws but none of it solves the problem. Let's examine what happened, why did we miss the Tsarnaev brothers, why did we miss the San Bernardino couple? It wasn't because we had stopped collected metadata it was because, I think, as someone who comes from the technology world, we were using the wrong algorithms.

Steve Martin said that philosophy is good for comedy because it screws up your thinking just enough, and I agree with that. Being forced to see life's metadata is good training for looking for interesting angles on a topic.

What the USA Freedom Act did is it did two things. Number one, it ended the federal government's bulk collection of phone metadata of millions of law-abiding citizens.