"Using Metadata to find Paul Revere"

An example of how metadata from phone and internet records can be easily used to identify key connections and people in a network, using simple data about Paul Revere and his membership in various revolutionary Boston societies.

And this from one of Instapundit's readers:

It appears to me that something is not being highlighted enough. Preston makes excellent points about the thoroughness of the Obama information on their own donors, and how to use that information. You yourself make the connection about the know-how to use what the NSA programs were doing and apply it to their own campaign.Are people yet making the connection between the data that the IRS was trying to compile on Tea Party groups and the NSA program structure? We have heard how the questionaires being sent to the 501(c)4 groups were asking for social networking contacts, donor lists, websites, etc…..

It seems to me that this targetted collection of networking data was being done explicitly to build up the same sort of deep database of their political opponents. Even the recent fun mental exercise of identifying Paul Revere as one of the lynch-pins of the American Revolution by using the same techniques, this data collection on political enemies is designed to do the exact same thing. Find those most crucial in either influence, fundraising, publishing, and education, and do………. what? I’m sure it isn’t to help, and if not, what is left?I think this needs to be pointed out repeatedly, the NSA programs and the IRS data collection are intrinsically tied together and this needs to be shouted from the rooftops.