Love this linguistic gem: "telephony metadata"; Gail Collins: Intelligence for Dummies

[Smarmie Doofus]

My... oh... my.

Intelligence for Dummies
By GAIL COLLINS

Question for the day: Do you feel more secure or less secure, now that you know the government is keeping a gargantuan pile of information about everybody’s telephone calls in the name of national security?


You have heard, I’m sure, that the National Security Agency has been mining Verizon’s records for information, such as numbers called and the location where the call was made. This is known as “telephony metadata,” and the very fact that we now have a term like “telephony metadata” is perhaps reason enough to be against the entire concept.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” President Obama assured the American people on Friday. Well, probably nobody. And, if they are, it’s under an entirely different part of the program.

We’ve had a passel of these stories this week. (It also appears that the N.S.A. is sucking personal e-mails and other data from the servers of the giant Internet companies.) Security issues are very tough to figure out. One side is always saying, as Obama did on Friday, that whatever is going on will “help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

The phrase “help us prevent terrorist attacks” is sort of a conversation-stopper.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/opinion/collins-intelligence-for-dummies.html

[Smarmie Doofus]

1. "All Aloney By the Telephony"... GC, from the hard copy version.

[Recursion]

2. Maybe it's just because I'm techie, but I don't see what's wrong with that term

"Telephony" is what we call the technology and systems of telephone connections.

"Metadata" is data used to route user data to its destination.

[arely staircase]

3. colbert

“Metadata is information about a call’s length, location and participants, and telephony is what a 2-year-old calls a telephone. Believe me, Obama knows all about the phone calls between Betsy and puppy wuppy”

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[Igel]

4. And that's the level of discourse

when you turn to entertainers for hard information.