Ride the Lightning

DEA Routinely Uses AT&T's Phone Record Database

September 3, 2013

Move over NSA. You are a mere pretender. Thanks to an article in the New York Times, we now know about The Hemisphere Project (where do they get these innocuous names?). 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 NSA's controversial collection of phone call logs.

The Hemisphere Project is a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T.

The government pays (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.

Striking that this usage of data is not for national security, but for law enforcement.

The NSA really is a pretender here. Under the Patriot Act, it stores phone numbers, time and duration of calls etc. for five years. But 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. Four billion call records are added to the database each day according to the slides – and this data includes information on the location of callers.

The slides, which say the program was started in 2007, were given to The New York Times by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist in Port Hadlock, Washington. He 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.

One slide says, “All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document.”  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. They differentiate the program from the NSA's collection of phone records by saying that the data is stored by AT&T.

The data is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas” not issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the DEA. A spokesman for AT&T declined to answer more than a dozen detailed questions, including what percentage of phone calls made in the United States 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.

I have sympathy for the purposes for which this program was established. But the government paying AT&T employees? It is a bit incestuous, especially where there are Fourth Amendment concerns. And once again, here is a huge pool of data on American citizens and we are expected to be complacent in the face of government reassurances about how the data will be used.