Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s
Source: New York Times
For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans phone calls parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agencys hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.
The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.
The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.
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The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years.
Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch not just those made by AT&T customers and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.
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Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-phone-trove-eclipsing-nsas.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all
bananas
(27,509 posts)slide show: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/02/us/hemisphere-project.html
as pdf: http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/782287/database.pdf
The slides were given to The New York Times by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist in Port Hadlock, Wash. He said he had received the PowerPoint presentation, which is unclassified but marked Law enforcement sensitive, in response to a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies.
Downwinder
(12,869 posts)in illegal drug transactions? So, when is the Government going to confiscate AT&T? They confiscate cars and homes, why not a corporation?
bucolic_frolic
(43,128 posts)Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)If there are databases of calls going back 26 years, they could stop phone spam in a day. I can only conclude that AT&T condones illegal telemarketing.
uhnope
(6,419 posts)I predict