Tech 2 – by Anujeet MajumdarAnew surveillance progamme has now come to light that is far greater in size than NSA’s PRISM programme, according to the New York Times. Law enforcement officers, as part of a counter-narcotics programme, have routinely been able to access a huge AT&T database containing decades of American phone calls records for the past six years.
The programme, titled the Hemisphere project, is a collaborative effort between federal and local drug officials and AT&T. The US government reportedly pays the telecom provider to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. The partnership sees AT&T employees sitting with Drug Enforcement Administration agents as well as local detectives to supply authorities with phone call logs dating back to 1987.
The scale of the data collection for the Hemisphere project seems unparalleled. In comparison, the NSA’s programme collects phone numbers, time and call durations in the United States for the past five years. And Hemisphere covers all calls coming through an AT&T switch, not just from its customers, and provides call logs for the last 26 years. This data was revealed in leaked Hemisphere training slides which reportedly bore the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy logo.
The slides also detailed that around four billion call records are added to the database per day. And unlike the NSA data, Hemisphere comes with information concerning the locations of callers.
The slides were leaked by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist who said that he came across this presentation after making a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies. The project reportedly began in 2007, and has been carried out secretly ever since.
The Obama administration, according to the source, has acknowledged that the Hemisphere database is indeed a massive collection of information. In addition, the administration has also agreed that the manner in which AT&T employees are being used in government drug units is unusual.
Rationalising the need for the same, though, the White House has said that the project is useful to find criminals who discard cellphones frequently to avoid government tracking. The key difference, according to the administration, is that all the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government, as in the case with programmes like PRISM.
Law enforcement agencies normally look for phone numbers of interest by using “administrative subpoenas.” These subpoenas are not issued by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A). The cost for this programme, according to the report, is footed by the D.E.A and the White House drug policy office, but the exact amount being shelled out has not been revealed.
The issue of privacy is still being raised though. Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, while talking to the source, said that the 27-slide PowerPoint presentation, evidently updated this year to train AT&T employees for the program, “certainly raises profound privacy concerns.” A spokesman for AT&T declined to comment about the project. In an email to the source, the spokesman said, “While we cannot comment on any particular matter, we, like all other companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law enforcement.”
Other telecom providers like Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile have also declined to comment about whether their companies were aware of Hemisphere or participated in that program or similar ones. A federal law enforcement official has said, though, that the Hemisphere Project was “singular” and that he knew of no comparable program involving other phone companies.
The leaked slides, however, come with several “success” stories highlighting the project’s success. One such case was reportedly seen in March 2013, where a new phone number and location of a man impersonating a general ran over a Navy intelligence agent at a San Diego Navy base, was picked up. Another example showed how Hemisphere helped to track drug dealers who were rotating pre-paid phones, ultimately resulting in the seizure of 136 kilos of cocaine and $2.2 million.