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RT
September 3, 2013
For at least six years, US anti-drug agents have used subpoenas to routinely gain access to an enormous AT&T database. It’s an intrusion greater in scale and longevity than the NSA’s collection of phone calls, revealed by Edward Snowden’s leaks.
As part of the secret Hemisphere Project the government has been paying AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country, the New York Times reports.
The US’s largest telecoms operator has been supplying phone data to the Drug Enforcement Administration since 1987.
The project covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch, including those made by clients of other operators, with some four billion call records added to the database on a daily basis.
And, unlike the much debated NSA data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the location of those, making the calls.
The New York Times found out about the surveillance program after it received slides, describing the Hemisphere Project, from peace activist, Drew Hendricks.
The activist said he was sent 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 slides revealed that the program was launched back in 2007 and has been carried out in great secrecy since then.
“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one of the slides said.
The paper performed a search of the Nexis database, but found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.
The US administration has acknowledged that Hemisphere is operational in three states, adding that the project employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.
