The article never made it into my printed paper:
"Drug agents using vast phone trove eclipsing NSA’s; Federal officials had routine access to AT&T database" by Scott Shane and Colin Moynihan | New York Times, September 02, 2013
NEW YORK — 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 Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.
And they keep trying to tell you they are throwing records out. They never throw anything out.
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.
It didn't have to be reported; we have suspected such for a long time.
The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country.
Is that really a GOOD USE of TAX DOLLARS in this AGE of AUSTERITY?
Time to legalize the stuff and tax it!
Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.
Holy f***ing s***!
The project comes to light at a time of vigorous public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance and on the relationship between government agencies and communications companies. It offers the most significant look to date at the use of such large-scale data for law enforcement, rather than for national security.
The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the NSA’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The NSA stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years. Unlike the NSA data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.
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 4 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.
There was once a day if you said something like that people thought you were a crazy conspiracy theorist on drugs.
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.
The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.
“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or congressional hearings.
That sounds conspiratorial, doesn't it?
Related(?): Obama's Alphabet Scandals: EPA E-Mails
Looks illegal, too!
The Obama administration acknowledged the extraordinary scale of the Hemisphere database and the unusual embedding of AT&T employees in government drug units in three states.
But they said the project, which has proved especially useful in finding criminals who discard cellphones frequently to thwart government tracking, employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.
Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the NSA program.
As if it matters anymore!
They are BOTH ONE in the SAME! This government is now a government OF, BY, and FOR CORPORATIONS!
It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called administrative subpoenas, those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the DEA.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations.”
Fallon said that “the records are maintained at all times by the phone company, not the government,” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone company so law enforcement can quickly keep up with drug dealers when they switch phone numbers to try to avoid detection.”
Maybe you should call over to the NSA for help.
Related: The NSA is giving your phone records to the DEA. And the DEA is covering it up.
Oh, already did.
And maybe you guys should tell the biggest drug smugglers and dealers in the world, the CIA, to knock it off.
He said that the program was paid for by the DEA and the White House drug policy office but that the cost was not immediately available.
It must be a whopper of a $um.
Officials said four AT&T employees are now working in what is called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which brings together DEA and local investigators — two in the program’s Atlanta office and one each in Houston and Los Angeles.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the 27-slide PowerPoint presentation, evidently updated this year to train AT&T employees for the program, “certainly raises profound privacy concerns.”
There is no more privacy in AmeriKa.
“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,” he said....
I guess that's why the printed paper never bothered to publish this.
--more--"
Related: Globe Not on Guardian
Never saw that in printed form, either.
