Surveiled sentiments

Bad analogy, Pres: Had the Brits done metadata like you would, they would have taken out Paul Revere and we'd still be eating kidney pie.
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 17, 2014

I can't get over how the Paul Revere metadata case is supposed to be some kind of argument. Kieran Healy's great paper on the subject, which I have referenced before, doesn't show that social network intelligence gathering is bad, but that it's effective. It just happened that the data Healy had in hand was about people we think of as good guys, the Boston revolutionaries*, so it was the bad guys that would have profited from it.

But it could just as easily been the other way around. Wouldn't it have been nice for General Washington to have a similar line on the various, and variously paramilitary, "Loyalist" and "Refugee" associations of the Revolutionary period? A clear picture of network densities might have pointed him to the treachery of his blue-eyed boy General Benedict Arnold, who was secretly running the American Legion that looted Richmond in 1780 and New London in 1781, before Arnold permanently escaped; or nabbed Governor William Franklin of New Jersey, old Ben's wicked son, who was in covert charge of a couple of different pro-British guerilla organizations. And couldn't a tool like that have been useful to the Spanish government in 1936 or the Chilean government in 1972 or the Haitian government in 2004?

Spanish Civil War. Uncredited image from libcom.org.

*Though when you think about it, I bet there are some Native Americans who got a better deal with the Tories, and people of African descent whose ancestors would have been freed from slavery decades earlier if the English had won the war, who might want to challenge that.