Is this a joke? This sounds exactly like what Borne Again Christians, including George W. Bush believe in.

Metadata is just data about data. This can be almost anything. For voice recordings, you could reasonably claim the following information to be metadata:
- Existence of keywords or keyphrases
- Voice signatures, identifying the speakers
- Stress levels of the voices

If you look at how US agencies are gaming the legal system, they will probably claim that transcripts of conversations are not the conversations themselves and therefore metadata.

Can we call this the Vasa effect? Named after the pride of the Swedish marine that sank minutes into its maiden voyage, killing dozens of the crew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)

I live in Germany. And while we import a lot of oil from Russia and Norway, we are still more dependent on oil from the middle east than the US.

See http://knoema.de/jygmcvb/crude-oil-imports-into-the-eu-27-from-different-countries

The US doesn't really need oil from the middle east. Europe and Asia do.

Eduard Snowden wasn't employed by the NSA, but by Booz Allen Hamilton, which belongs to the Carlyle Group. Think about the opportunities insider information offers to these kinds of investors.

A non-US competitor to VISA would be even more important.

US companies won't regain any trust until the US government lifts all gag orders that came attached to NSLs.

Just that they're out to get you doesn't mean your not paranoid.

But how can we assess the probability of a successful attack? Since most companies choose not to disclose breaches, we don't have meaningful statistics to base our estimates on.

Prevent Any Truly Empowering New Technologies

And you can probably forget about your security clearance if you order any of these books.

It means that they don't provide the encryption keys. And the unencrypted data is provided to government agencies in accordance with the law. Since there are secret laws, we don't know under what conditions the data is provided.

VR for personal use so far has failed because the hardware was crap or unaffordable. I will buy an Oculus Rift and I don't care how it looks. I won't use it for an audience.

Wasn't the frequency hopping rate in cell phone standards lowered to make surveillance more easy? AFAIK this happened far more than a decade ago.