Pubdate: Mon, 02 Sep 2013
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2013 The Dallas Morning News, Inc.
Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/send-a-letter/
Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117

AT&T GIVING DEA ACCESS

Project Uses Phone Data Going Back Decades for Law Enforcement

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.

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 
Dallas-based 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.

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.

Phone data

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. 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.

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 it 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, the administration said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, 
and not by the government as in the NSA program. 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.

'Profound' concerns

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, 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."

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.

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 27slide PowerPoint presentation, evidently updated 
this year to train AT&T employees for the program, "certainly raises 
profound privacy concerns."

"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.

Jaffer said that while the database remained in AT&T's possession, 
"the integration of government agents into the process means there 
are serious Fourth Amendment concerns."

Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, declined to answer more than a 
dozen detailed questions, including ones about what percentage of 
phone calls made in the U.S. were covered by Hemisphere, the size of 
the Hemisphere database, whether the AT&T employees working on 
Hemisphere had security clearances and whether the company has 
conducted any legal review of the program

"While we cannot comment on any particular matter, we, like all other 
companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law 
enforcement," Siegel wrote in an email.

FROM WIRE REPORTS
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom