Consequences of Prohibition
Politics & Advocacy
For at least six years, the DEA has had access to a massive AT&T database of phone call records dating back to 1987, the New York Times reported Sunday. According to the report, the DEA pays AT&T to place company employees in DEA offices around the country, where they supply DEA agents with phone data in compliance with federal subpoenas.
It only came to light because a Washington peace activist filed a FOIA lawsuit seeking information from West Coast law enforcement agencies, and one of them included training slides from the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The slides, which included a power point presentation, were marked "law enforcement sensitive."
They revealed not only the existence of the Hemisphere Project, but also efforts to keep it secret.
"All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document," one slide said.
The exposure of Hemisphere comes at a time when concern over government surveillance technologies is high, as revelations from former NSA employee Edward Snowden and his interlocutors about the extent of spying continue to appear on a regular basis. While NSA spying is ostensibly directed at foreign terrorists, it has also provided surveillance information to the DEA for use not in terrorism investigations, but in criminal ones.
Federal officials told the Times that the Hemisphere Project was no big deal, saying it has been useful in finding drug dealers who frequently discard cell phones and it uses investigative techniques that have been employed for decades and present no new privacy issues.
Privacy and civil liberties advocates begged to differ.
The Hemisphere Project "certainly raises profound privacy concerns," ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer told the Times. "I'd speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts," he said. And while he acknowledged that the database remained in AT&T's possession, "the integration of government agents into the process means there are serious Fourth Amendment concerns."
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Comments
Clear Misuse of Power
When the government and the corporations work together in this way, like putting AT&T employees at the DEA, you have FASCISM. This is the very definition of it. This is a total misuse of data collection and speaks to the challenges human beings face in the presence of all this information. Most humans in a position of power such as those at the DEA are going to misuse their access to this type of information (and we are talking about a lot of information). Misusing NSA data and recreating the trail so that it does not look like they are is a hallmark of corruption. Too bad these are un-elected, bureaucratic administrators. It makes them much more difficult to hold accountable.
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