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The Berlin Wall was still there in 1987, but thanks to AT&T and the Drug Enforcement Administration, your privacy was gone.
The New York Times has revealed the U.S. government, in close cooperation with AT&T, has been accessing an enormous AT&T database containing decades of data about nearly every phone call placed in the United States, including calling locations, numbers called, and the length of each call.
The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T, has been up and running for at least six years. AT&T’s secret database of telephone calling records can be accessed upon receipt of an administrative subpoena. The arrangement has proved lucrative for AT&T, paid for its participation. AT&T employees also enjoy real world experience in law enforcement, often placed in law enforcement drug-fighting units nationwide and paid by the U.S. government.
U.S. taxpayers ultimately pick up all the expenses.
Each day, some four billion call records are swept into the database, which is stored by AT&T. The U.S. government then pays for AT&T employees to station themselves inside DEA units, where they can quickly hand over records.
The scope of the program goes beyond the data collected by the National Security Agency, according to the Times. AT&T’s data is more comprehensive than that collected by the NSA, and involves any telephone call that passes through an AT&T switch, not just those made by AT&T customers.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations.”
Fallon said Americans concerned about privacy can rest easy because the calling records are kept by AT&T, not the government.
[flv width=”640″ height=”370″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Democracy Now ATT DEA Data Mine 9-3-13.flv[/flv]
Democracy Now talks with the New York Times reporter who broke the story that AT&T and the Drug Enforcement Administration have access to your phone records dating back to 1987. (8 minutes)
This type of access is more scary to me than the gross violations of the NSA data collections efforts. With corporations collecting your information where you have no right or reasonable way to opt out or ensure you’re privacy and legal rights are respected, they’re simply sold to the highest bidder, or whatever government agency can present a sufficient legal request at the time – often for complete dumps rather than a specific individual. Hearing the usual “I haven’t done anything wrong, why should I care” gets rather old, there’s a reason protections like these were put in place a… Read more »