Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s
By SCOTT SHANE and COLIN MOYNIHAN
Published: September 1, 2013 286 Comments
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.
Edouard H.R.Gluck/Associated Press
A New York training site for the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which includes federal and local investigators. AT&T employees are embedded in the program in three states.
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Cliff Owen/Associated Press
Jameel Jaffer of the A.C.L.U. says a slide presentation on the Hemisphere Project raises “profound privacy concerns.”
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The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.
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.
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