I consider this article not as an attempt to discredit these techniques by making patriotic references, but as an excellent starting point to help people start building instincts about what their "useless metadata" could actually be used for.

The great challenge we face in educating the populace (and indeed, ourselves) is that people lack any intuition for what sorts of data they should or should not broadcast. People are hesitant (I hope!) to give out home addresses to strangers without good cause--we have no such innate hunches about the data and metadata we leak.