Snowden revealed how the American and British intelligence services systematically intercept metadata from the world's population. Meanwhile, the Danish project #Sporet (in English #Tracked) made the debate concrete and demonstrated how detailed one can identify peoples' thoughts and living patterns solely by using so-called metadata.
A team from Danish daily Berlingske collected, analyzed, and presented full data sets on two MPs from each party in the Danish government, using more than 18,000 e-mails, 31,000 registered telecommunications data items, 34,000 location points and thousands more items of data from banks, calendars. browser histories, iphone apps, photos, internet shopping, tax authorities, police databases, Facebook and more. The data tell a unique story through graphs, maps, video, images and other advanced visualizations and is perhaps the most comprehensive data project made on personal data. #Sporet won the Nordic Data Awards in 2014 and a Data Journalism Award in 2015.
IMSI-catchers are used by law enforcement in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, for tracking organized crime and intelligence-gathering. A team from daily Aftenposten wanted to find out how often this technology was used in Norway, and whether its use was legal. They started their chase with 100,000 rows of measurements from a cryptophone and 42,000 rows of different variables taken from mobile networks in Oslo. Here is the first story they broke.
