[Lamplighter]

Here is a new program published today ... a program called "HEMISPHERE"
It's not just cell phones... it's every call that goes through an AT&T "switch"

NY Times
SCOTT SHANE and COLIN MOYNIHAN
9/1/13

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics 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.<snip>

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.
Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say;
technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record.
Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.<snip>

Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T,
and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program.
It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called
“administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge
but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.<snip>

“Is this a massive change in the way the government operates?
No,” said Mr. Richman, who worked as a federal drug prosecutor in Manhattan in the early 1990s.
“Actually you could say that it’s a desperate effort by the government to catch up.”

But Mr. Richman said the program at least touched on an unresolved Fourth Amendment question:
whether mere government possession of huge amounts of private data,
rather than its actual use, may trespass on the amendment’s
requirement that searches be “reasonable.”
Even though the data resides with AT&T, the deep interest and involvement of the government
in its storage may raise constitutional issues, he said.

Here is the article-link to the slides described above...


NY Times
9/1/13

Synopsis of the Hemisphere Project

The government 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.

A slide presentation given to The New York Times shows that the Hemisphere Project
was started in 2007 and has been carried out in great secrecy.