Peace Activist's FOIA Accidentally Exposes:"DEA PAYS AT&T for Access to 26 Years of Phone Records"

[KoKo]

The DEA Pays AT&T for Access to 26 Years of Phone Records

According to reports from The New York Times and ABC News, the DEA has been paying AT&T since 2007 to work directly with the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program to offer access to every call that goes through the communications company's switchboard. The Hemisphere Project, an unclassified but "law enforcement sensitive" program, places an AT&T employee in four DEA offices across the country -- two in Los Angeles, one in Houston, one in Atlanta -- to assist federal and local officials working together to track down suspects. It gives the DEA access to records including phone numbers, time and duration of calls and the location where the call was made dating back 26 years -- all the way back to 1987. "Some four billion call records are added to the database every day," the Times explains, per training slides for AT&T employees that were released through FOIA requests.
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Two legal experts contacted by the Times had differing opinions on the programs legality. "Is this a massive change in the way the government operates? No," said Columbia law professor Daniel C. Richman. Richman acknowledged there are questions to be asked about the ease with which law enforcement can access the data. "I’d speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts," deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union Jameel Jaffer said.
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The craziest part about this story -- besides the massive, questionable partnership between a major law enforcement program and a telecommunications company -- is how the program came to light. Andrew Hendricks, a Washington peace activist, obtained a Powerpoint presentation explaining the program through a Freedom of Information Act request to West Coast police departments while he was investigating something completely unrelated. He gave them to the Times, and also uploaded them to the Internet for the rest of the world to see. You can read through the slides below:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/09/dea-pays-t-access-26-years-phone-records/68943/

[gopiscrap]

1. Fuck we as a nation needs to wake up!

[Mojorabbit]

2. Whoa! nt

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Didn't even know they KEPT records that long.

Any sane person who wants to do nefarious activities is going to switch to strong encryption anyhow,
or "burners", one use and throw away cell phones.

[Recursion]

9. AT&T probably keeps the metadata forever

It's very useful for quality of service metrics

Any sane person who wants to do nefarious activities is going to switch to strong encryption

Encryption protects the contents, and phone traffic is encrypted for the most part as it is (even AT&T could only with difficulty listen to your conversations). Metadata is by design necessity unencrypted, and is by design necessity available to lots of third parties anyways even without nefarious shenanigans. Even if the government's access to the data is problematic, if people have been operating under the assumption that the routing of phone and internet data has been private, let that misunderstanding end now.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

4. And with all this data, the DOJ can't go after the banksters?

[Recursion]

10. How many do they have to sue before people stop saying this?

I think it's up to 3000 since 2009, and the new SEC woman is going for jail time on her cases.

[Trillo]

12. Sounds like a news cycle problem

If there's 3000 since 2009, then we should be reading at least 2 news items perday about the handcuffing and jailing of yet another bankster.

[Recursion]

13. Well, I'm still not sure what a "bankster" is

But 3000 is the number of lawsuits brought against financial firms or their employees under the Obama admin. Most generally don't involve frog marches, but a few have, and this latest hedge fund one did have a nice frog march and will almost certainly involve jail time since the SEC has said it absolutely won't settle.

[Hekate]

14. That is really great news. Too bad it's not reported here

This is the first I've seen of it, at least, but it is cheering news.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

15. You claim to not know what a "bankster" is, but you claim that the DOJ has gone after 3000.

Wouldn't you understand, as intelligent people commonly do, that the term "bankster" refers to a criminal? A type of criminal that has violated federal criminal laws while being in the banking business.

At a minimum, wouldn't you understand that a banker who has been involved in the robo-signing of false documents to facilitate foreclosures to benefit their bank is a bankster? Do you not know that signing and recording false documents is a crime?

Do you not know that federal crimes have been violated by people who work at and control banks? At you employed at the DOJ?

[ljm2002]

5. Pffft... this is no bombshell...

...it's only PowerPoint slides, ferchrissakes... and it proves nothing!

for the impaired

[surrealAmerican]

6. To quote a supreme court justice from a bygone era:

To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means - to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal - would bring terrible retribution.
Louis D Brandeis

[Luminous Animal]

7. Kick

[Luminous Animal]

8. Kick. Again.

[Recursion]

11. I just want to point out that those of us who responeded to Snowden with a "meh"

did so because stuff like this has been going on for a long time because by the nature of the technology routing data is not private. You're asking a bunch of different companies to do something for you, and at that point it's hard to say you're keeping it a secret.

[ConcernedCanuk]

16. One should consider what the government is doing

.
.
.

and have done that we DON'T know about,

yet.



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