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.'"

Comments

WTF???

[mcgrew]

The article is behind a god damned paywall. This one isn't. Google lists many, many sources.

Does Jah-Wren Ryel work for the Times and is trying to increase subscription numbers? A link to a paywall is no citation whatever.

Oh, and according to what I read, these aren't warrentless searches.

Re:WTF???

[AHuxley]

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.

Re:WTF???

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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'...)

Re:WTF???

[ShanghaiBill]

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, and only saw records of specific individuals, and only when they had sufficient probable cause to get a subpoena. It is the way the system is supposed to work, and is the way it should have worked with the NSA. What you should be outraged about is the very existence of the DEA, a government agency devoted to monitoring and controlling our bodily fluids. Once you get past that, worrying about a few phone records is pretty silly.

Re:WTF???

[EmperorArthur]

That's great, except that all of our phone calls are still being recorded. This is something the Stasi could only DREAM of.

Read a little closer. This is the metadata that everyone is so worried about. It's not the actual conversation that's recorded, but the number called, call duration, and locations the cell phone was in for the duration of the call. The only new thing added to this list since the last half century is location data.

The scary thing about this is AT&T never deletes your call data. EVER. There's a reason why some EU privacy directives have a retention limit. Which is ironically in direct contrast to the mandatory retention policies for law enforcement use in those very same countries.

Re:WTF???

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:WTF???

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:WTF???

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

and only when they had sufficient probable cause to get a subpoena.

If by sufficient you mean none at all.

"Probable cause is not a prerequisite to the issuance of a subpoena."

Re:WTF???

[nbauman]

This is the metadata that everyone is so worried about. It's not the actual conversation that's recorded, but the number called, call duration, and locations the cell phone was in for the duration of the call.

That's a lot. It means they can track you everywhere you make a phone call. If I go to my girlfriend's house and make a call there, it means they know who my girlfriend is.

It means that if I'm the (Democratic) governor of a state, and I call up an escort service, the (Republican) federal prosecutor will know about it, and he can decide whether to prosecute me or not, at his sole discretion. He can even agree not to prosecute me if I agree to step down from office, to be replaced by an ineffective successor.

Disclaimer

[amiga3D]

I think there is a simple solution for this. All phones sold should have a written disclaimer stamped on the case that reads "All calls are monitored for possible criminal activity and any other reason the authorities may deem necessary." I can't believe anyone thinks there is any privacy left on any public communications system.

Re:Disclaimer

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In other news, an ample supply of white flags is a cheap and effective national defense strategy...

Important clause there

[Rob the Bold]

'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.'

See that, NSA? Somehow the DEA managed to use the ordinary justice system without totally dismantling the Constitution.

Not that I think the War on Drugs (TM) is any less stupid and wasteful than the War on Terrism (TM), but at least we see that we don't need a parallel, secret justice [sic] system to "fight" it.

Re:Important clause there

[Anonymous Coward]

They are administrative subpoenas, issued by the DEA, and never seen by a judge or a grand jury. These shouldn't be constitutional either.

Re:Not really no. He voted with his party

[mcgrew]

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.

Re:Why was this even posted?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.