> I can't think of a lot of crimes whose metadata warrants being killed for personally

You're (literally) missing links then. If A is a high-value target that we look at closely (because they're a high-value target), what if B frequently contacts A? If C, D, and E always recieve messages from B immediately following A messaging B?

What about times? Is B messaging F at a consistant time, and never outside of that? Is A only messaging G, at a set time, with G's phone immediately being put into (ineffective) airplane mode immediately before and after?

Facebook built their business on the social graph, but the CIA's been at this for decades

Isn't this already happening? It's why the war department uses ChatGPT and Claude to target drone strikes. It's why Anthropic had to make a public scene to pretend that wasn't happening.

In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, thoughtcrime, also known as crimethink in the official language of Newspeak, is the offense of thinking in ways not approved by the ruling Ingsoc party. It describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of The Party controls the speech, actions, and thoughts of the citizens of Oceania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime

Maybe just search for it and pick a source you trust. Take the search term "kill people based on metadata" and no noise comes up, just tons of articles about General Hayden's interview and related