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AT&T Maintains Call Database For the DEA Going Back To 1987
Jah-Wren Ryel writes "Forget the NSA — the DEA has been working hand-in-hand with AT&T on a database of records of every call that passes through AT&T's phone switches going back as far as 1987. The government pays AT&T for contractors who sit side-by-side with DEA agents and do phone records searches for them. From the article: 'For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counter narcotics 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.'"
Per NPR:
"We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. "What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. ... That information is useful."
President Obama seems to lie every time he opens his mouth.
They are administrative subpoenas, issued by the DEA, and never seen by a judge or a grand jury. These shouldn't be constitutional either.
Welcome to the Hemisphere Project (a term not found in many "official documents" it seems:
Every call that passes through a switch is covered ie not just one teclo's customers.
All the call data ie the classic pen register seems to be collected at the rate "four billion call records are added to the database every day".
The locations of callers is also logged.
The data is not stored by the US gov ie telco employees work on the system ie as "private data".
All done under friendly administrative warrants -ie courts??? judges???
Basically it is what many have hinted at - total mastery of all US calls via one telco.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The slide deck is available.
Aside from the 'WTF is AT&T doing with over a quarter-century of phone records that would justify the cost of storing them, anyway?' angle, there are a few... concerning... elements.
1. The searches aren't "warrantless" in the strictest sense; but apparently most of them occur by the process of 'administrative subpoena', which requires no judicial oversight. The DEA has the power to get one simply by asserting that it needs one because drugs. (Sections 506 and 507 of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970). Given that the features of the program include turnaround times of an hour or less, barring atypically complex queries, there is clearly very limited review going on. It isn't the DEA running raw SQL queries; but the separation between it being the 'DEA's database' and 'AT&T's database' appears to be fairly limited.
2. Pretty much everything in the section of the presentation entitled "Protecting The Program"(starts on page 8): The program is 'unclassified' but "All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document" and there are specific instructions on how to conceal Hemisphere as the source in an investigation by using it first, to guide further subpoenas, and then retroactively building a case only on the subsequent subpoenas, in order to conceal, from the court and everyone else, the role of Hemisphere. As they describe the process:
When a complete set of CDRs are subpoenaed from the carrier, then all memorialized references to relevant and pertinent calls can be attributed to the carrier’s records, thus “walling off” the information obtained from Hemisphere. In other words, Hemisphere can easily be protected if it is used as a pointer system to uncover relevant numbers.
In special cases, we realize that it might not be possible to obtain subpoenaed phone records that will “wall off” Hemisphere.
In these special circumstances, the Hemisphere analyst should be contacted immediately. The analyst will work with the investigator and request a separate subpoena to AT&T
This practice of evidence laundering would appear to be very similar to the "Parallel Construction" process described as in use by the DEA for other giant secretive data sources (with 'Parallel Construction' being the term for "recreating" a fictional chain of evidence that excludes the existence of sensitive data sources. Less friendly audiences might call this 'perjury'...)
I can't stand Ron Paul but you really can't tie Ron Paul to any of the complaints you just listed since he was on voting record for being against everything you just mentioned.
And you also can't say the democrats are less in favor of warrant less anything when these types of wiretaps and general invasions of privacy has increased since the democrats took over. I guess you can make the case that the democrats talk louder against theses actions, but that doesn't really count for shit - well, I guess talking loud works to fool people like you.
Ron Paul was a libertarian in the party that started the war on drugs (Reagan)
Nixon came up with the phrase, although it actually started under a Democrat, young fellow.
Free Martian Whores!
Doesn't involve a judge though. Just the DEA.
Wrong. If there's a subpoena, there's a judge.
Not necessarily. The DEA gained the ability to issue 'administrative subpoenas' in 1970, and uses them routinely and on a nontrivial scale. All they have to do is assert that the material is 'relevant to an investigation' and out it goes. No muss, no fuss, no tedious judicial oversight.
If there's been a paper trail of this leading all the way back to 1987, why are we only just now hearing about it?
Because it is no big deal. The DEA had proper judicial oversight,
"Administrative subpoena" == NO judicial oversight, not even by a judge's clerk. The term is newspeak, deliberately chosen to induce exactly the misunderstanding you had.
Does Jah-Wren Ryel work for the Times and is trying to increase subscription numbers? A link to a paywall is no citation whatever.
I use a combination of plugins that have the side-effect of making most paywalls disappear, I don't even know it is there.
I recommend you do it too:
CookieSaver Lite - Set to block the NYTimes cookies
RefControl - Set to spoof the referrer when reading all NYTimes pages as "http://google.com/"
NoScript - The NY Times does not need javascript for most pages. This may be optional for the NY Times but there are some paywalls like foreignpolicy.com that do rely on javascript.
FYI - the NY Times article is the definitive citation as they are the ones who broke the story.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.