Thanks. Your post is to the point and absolutely right.

Without getting the content of your communications, just based on metadata, the government can identify whistleblowers, malcontents, people who report corruption and wrongdoing on the part of the government to Congress or a judge or the press.

This is what people have to understand.

This surveillance program insures job security for those people in government who happen to be crooks.

We need freedom. We need the ability to contact our members of Congress without our government seeing our communications in our metadata.

For example:

Meanwhile in America, the 'land of free,' another NYTimes article exposed how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) operated a "wide-ranging surveillance operation" and spied on "a group of its own scientists" by secretly capturing "thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama."

The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.

This surveillance resulted in more than 80,000 pages of computer documents. After reviewing them, The New York Times wrote, "The documents captured in the surveillance effort - including confidential letters to at least a half-dozen Congressional offices and oversight committees, drafts of legal filings and grievances, and personal e-mails - were posted on a public Web site, apparently by mistake, by a private document-handling contractor that works for the F.D.A."

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/hope-9-whistleblower-binney-says-nsa-has-dossiers-nearly-every-us-citizen

I think that was under the Bush administration, but the collection of the metadata that made that kind of surveillance and investigation of the dissident (honest) scientists possible is continuing under Obama.

I hope people now understand why this collection of metadata is an abomination and should be stopped.

in how they communicate right down to using two bean cans and a piece of string if necessary.