What is metadata?

Metadata is data about data. Every single digital artifact has it. It describes the who, what, when, where, how, and sometimes even, why, for any document, video, photo, or sound clip. This information comes in handy sometimes, like when you’re flipping through old pictures by date, or by location. But in the wrong hands, this same information could be damaging.

So, what does it look like?

Metadata exists in the parts of images, videos, or music that we can’t experience as humans. But if you pry into any digital artifact, you can see metadata as a list of keys (or tags) and their corresponding values. One of the simplest tags is “Creation Date,” which naturally points to the time when its creator pushed the shutter button, or pressed record. Other interesting tags include the “Make” and “Model” tags, which can tell you what type of camera or computer was used to create the media. There are dozens of such tags, and each one can help tell a very distinct story; this is why understanding how rich metadata is can better help protect the identities of sources who have shared their digital media with you.

Setting up a media workstation sandbox

Most of the tools mentioned in this guide can be used on most computer operating systems. While you could easily turn your computer into a powerful, metadata-crunching workhorse, take your own privacy and security into consideration. You may be working with extra-sensitive material, so it might not be wise to handle it on your day-to-day machine.

I find it easiest to juggle these considerations by compartmentalizing my workspace; having a dedicated space to prod, cut, copy, and paste gives me more confidence in my ability to handle sensitive media safely and sanely. I build myself a “sandbox”: a somewhat safe place to do somewhat dangerous things.

Tails

Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System), is a fully self-contained computer that lives on a USB drive. To use it, install Tails on a blank USB drive and plug it in to any PC or Mac. You’ll need to instruct your computer to boot up from USB, instead of your normal operating system (i.e. macOS or Windows). When you boot into it, you enable a session to do whatever you want to do, in relative safety. Once you shut down, all traces of your session are erased. This makes it an ideal sandbox.

Tails is an almost perfect choice for a media workstation, as it comes with tools like MAT, Exiftool, Gimp, and Audacity right out-of-the-box. For software packages that aren’t installed on Tails by default, you will have to start a Tails session with a set admin password and then download and install the appropriate software.

For example, if you want to install a PDF cleanup tool like First Look Media’s PDF Redact Tools in Tails, first connect to the internet and wait for Tor to get read. Then, navigate to: Applications > System Tools > Synaptic Package Manager and use the search feature to look for “pdf redact tools.”