And, of course, metadata doesn‘t add up to much data at all; it‘s just a few bits per file – who sent what to whom – and that‘s where the NSA finds much of its supposedly incriminating information. So, these numbers are meaningless when it comes to looking at how much the NSA knows about who‘s talking to whom. With the NSA‘s clearance to go three hops out from a suspect, it doesn‘t take very long at all before this law of large numbers encompasses practically everyone.