Why Government Phone Spying Is Really About Big Data

Verizon has given the U.S. National Security Agency information on all its telephone calls for months. But it's not the calls' content the government is looking at--it's their context. For the past three months, Verizon has handed over information on all telephone calls within its system to the U.S. government. This news, which broke last night thanks to a leaked court document, is a big story, but it isn't exactly a surprising one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group dedicated to the pr...