For Nation States, and the adversaries within America's boarders (special interest groups, cyber caliphate, Muslim brotherhood, Antifa etc), metadata is 'THE' silent weapon in this quiet information war.

Exfiltrated metadata from internet service providers and social media platforms can be plugged into big data analytics and once the right algorithm is applied, can allow an adversary surgically precise psychographic targeting of critical infrastructure executives with elevated privileges. Why is no one talking about this?

Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata. 'People get hung up that there's a targeted list of people,' he said. 'It's really like we're targeting a cell phone. We're not going after people – we're going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.