Documents Reveal More Details About Massive Federal Telephone Surveillance Program

Blacklisted news ^ | 22DEC18 | By: Mike Maharrey

[vannrox]

Documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reveal more about a super-secretive partnership between federal agents and AT&T to run a massive telephone surveillance program.

Hemisphere was first publicly disclosed in a New York Times article back in 2013 after a citizen activist in Seattle discovered the program through an open records request.

Here’s how the EFF describes Hemisphere.

Through the Hemisphere program, AT&T assists federal and local law enforcement in accessing and analyzing its massive database of call detail records (CDRs)—information on phone numbers dialed and received, as well as the time, date, and length of call and in some instances location information. More specifically, Hemisphere has access to telecommunication “switches” operated by AT&T that guide telephone calls. Because other providers use AT&T “switches” for their calls, the database contains call detail records regardless of carrier. The database has records concerning local, long distance, cellular, and international calls. Official government presentations estimate 4 billion call detail records populate the Hemisphere database on a daily basis. That includes records dating as far back as 1987, which is much further back than the records most telcos store.

AT&T employees help run the program, working within law enforcement agencies in LA, Houston and Atlanta. The feds pay their salaries through the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) through its High Intensity Drug Traffic Areas (HIDTA) program.

The federal government wrapped the program in secrecy. This includes intentionally leaving the detail of its use out of arrest reports and court proceedings. Federal agencies used data collected from Hemisphere for parallel construction – a practice former NSA Chief Technical Director William Binney called the country’s “greatest threat since the Civil War.”

Here’s how EFF explained it.

After using Hemisphere, cops devise a second, more conventional way to obtain the information, and put that reverse-engineered method down on paper. The result is that law enforcement lies about the origins of its investigative methods, which also prevents individuals they target from knowing about, much less challenging, the surveillance.

EFF pierced the veil of secrecy through a lawsuit and recently released documents it obtained. EFF attorney Aaron Mackey outlined the scope of the program in an interview with Courthouse News Services.

“The government has worked with AT&T to create this database where there are almost no barriers to law enforcement’s ability to access the information. Retention is forever.”

To access phone records through Hemisphere, DEA agents had to follow two steps.

Fill out a form Obtain an administrative subpoena.

The agency seeking the information issues administrative subpoenas. In other words, the DEA issues a subpoena on its own behalf with no judicial input. Mackey called this an inherent conflict of interest.

“There’s no third party overseeing the initial request,” Mackey said. He also told Courthouse News Service that he found no indication that DEA agents were required to state a justification for obtaining phone records in Hemisphere request forms.

According to EFF, the government can also use pattern analysis of data to track people’s social networks, physical locations and movements.

Unsurprisingly, government officials defended the unconstitutional program and the secrecy surrounding it. In an email obtained by EFF, an official referred to the program as nothing more than a “Super Search Engine” and a “Google on Steroids.” As the EFF wrote shortly after discovering the email:

Such descriptions confirm EFF’s worst fears that Hemisphere is a mass surveillance program that threatens core civil liberties.

The program poses severe Fourth Amendment concerns because police are obtaining detailed private information from the call records and learning even more about people’s social connections and physical movements based on pattern analysis. Federal officials do all of this without a warrant or any judicial oversight.

But beyond the Fourth Amendment problems, Hemisphere also poses acute risks to the First Amendment rights of callers caught in the program’s dragnet. Specifically, Hemisphere allows police to see a person’s associations, shedding light on their personal connections and political and social networks. It’s not hard to see such a tool being trained on activists and others critical of law enforcement, or being used by the government to identify entire organizations.

You can read more about what the documents uncovered by EFF revealed HERE.

This is just one of many federal government spy programs that operate outside of the Fourth Amendment with the support of state and local governments, and corporations like AT&T.

States can end cooperation with warrantless spying by prohibiting “material support or resources” to assist federal agencies in their actions. Michigan enacted a law doing just that earlier this year. They can also disincentivize corporations by passing the CHOICE ACT. This law penalizes corporations that work with federal spies by denying them access to state contracts. This forces companies to chose: do business with the NSA and support its rights violating operation, or refuse to provide such support and do business with the state.

[eyeamok]

Because the Cartel Bosses are all US Government Employees and Agents, we have been Playing both sides since Nixon started the War on controlled substances not available by prescription. Anyone that doesn’t know this must have been asleep in a cave their whole life.

[I want the USA back]

Of course. And it didn’t stop with telephones. The government can see anything you have posted on FB and other media, even if you deleted it. They have it in black and white. It’s your words. Saying it was a joke, or that you didn’t mean it, or that it was a mistake won’t work. They have it in clear, digital text. Easy prosecution.

Still think this is the land of the free? It ain’t no mo!

War on drugs is an excuse to set up the system of surveillance. The real purpose is control.

[patriotfury]

We learned of this back in 1984, after an a federal investigation was conducted to find out why hundreds of churches were getting billed, for thousands of hours of “adult”, “1-900” numbers across the Midwest, simutaneously.

In a single month, the small church (of about 80-100 people), which my family attended had been billed approximately $28,000 dollars by AT&T itself. This happened for a few months. The church building had a line, but no one was there in the building except 3 days a week.

In the end, a federal investigator literally told the pastor and deacons, that by regulation, every phone call and conversation was actually recorded, but they also had to know what they were looking for, and a judge had to sign off on warrants to ATT. The feds were able to go back and confirm the calls were made using the church number, but not made from the church line, as the feds were able to trace the origins of the actual call to AT&T itself. ATT did try to go after the couple hundred churches they initially billed however, until the feds stopped them.

During the federal investigation, it was discovered there was a small group of homosexuals working at AT&T, who had been caught, and admitted to devising a plan to go after churches, to hopefully shut them down.

There plan swept our small Baptist church up, with others across the Midwest, and tried to bill the churches for the “adult”, “1-900” numbers, with bills no church could afford, and which AT&T would try to sue all of the churches for. A few churches had already been shut down over it.

Investigators were able to establish the calls were being dialed very quickly, one after the next, from AT&T itself, using the churches phone numbers, and they were able to discover all of this by going back and having access to all data and any possible human recordings.

The homosexual group at AT&T, thought they could make the churches look really bad, stick them with bills which could not be paid, while simultaneously getting AT&T to legally come go after each church, which AT&T initially did.

For the sake of this article though, phone conversations and data have been recorded for several decades, as we actually experienced.