By
Mariano Blejman
Now that we know that Dropbox snoops in our files and that Google shares our data with the NSA and the FBI,
journalists must acquire new skills to avoid leaving a trace behind or let
others track anonymous sources.
Data on our data is called
"metadata." It's there every time we leave an electronic record
behind. When we take a photo, it will have data about the camera, the time it
was taken, and probably the name of who took it if geolocation and face
detection are enabled on the device. So taking a picture now is much more than
just a photo. It's telling information about yourself.
During this year's Media
Party, organized by Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires, Daniel Foguelman from the security company InfoByte,
led a workshop on discovering and cleaning your metadata. During
the workshop, Foguelman taught journalists how to discover and remove
information from pdfs, jpgs and htmls, to avoid leaving information behind
unintentionally.
Every time we send documents, in
addition to sending the content in the document, we are sending information
about the machine that processed it and the operating system. If the software
is registered, surely you will find your name in the properties window. When we
send an email, we are not just sending our content and recipient. Collectively,
we also reveal patterns in how we interacting with society and one another.
Some of this was uncovered by the Immersion experiment at MIT, which visualized
content from Gmail accounts in order to find communication patterns and
behavior.
MIT researchers were inspired by the
case of Edward Snowden, who showed us the
importance of metadata tracking by U.S. intelligence. Basically, as it has been
written many times, when communicating by Gmail - which has access to such data
– you can quickly learn about users' groups, relations, friends, contacts; in
short, everything that is inferred from the behavior of our data.
At the Knight-MIT Civic Media
Conference, in late June, at the entrance of the Media Lab, there was one giant
screen showing data of those who had dared to simply share their usernames and
passwords for the purpose of the demonstration, which showed how a machine can
quickly deduce relationships.
Journalists' documents produce
metadata, and all that data, which isn’t in the content, leave clues. Court
documents have metadata: the court number, name of the judge, the title and
number of pages. But we cannot live without metadata. We cannot send an email
without knowing where it will go or take a picture without knowing which camera
shot it. We cannot talk on mobile phone without the system knowing where we
are.
Metadata, of course, can also be a
source of information for investigative journalism: a way to get the anonymous
message, a way of connecting trails. At MIT, during a hackathon organized by
Knight-Mozilla Open News, Waldo Jaquit of State Decoded and Chase Davis of the
New York Times led a project called Judgmental.
The idea was to analyze legal texts
that were in PDF format, automatically find the metadata, create an API and
query the documents interactively. Hackathon attendees built the prototype in
two days. They figured out a way to find state documents with metadata that
could be used by legal researchers, based on finding the documents' marks.
Removing so much metadata when
addressing a journalistic investigation is a difficult and cumbersome task. The
best way to do it is to investigate oneself.
So start looking at what you're leaving
behind. Search your name on Google; look at the "info" section when
you're writing or editing documents; try to understand how other people are
watching your data; open your images on different computers and try to understand
what they're telling others about you.
Knight International Journalism Fellow Mariano Blejman is an editor and media
entrepreneur specializing in data-driven journalism.
This post was translated from Spanish
to English by Andrea Arzaba and Maite Fernández.
Global media innovation content related
to the projects and partners of the ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellows on IJNet
is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and edited
by Jennifer Dorroh.
Image: Screen grab of Immersion.
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