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 collection of phone call logs.
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 throughout 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.
The scale and longevity of the data storage appear to be unmatched by other government programs, including the National Security Agency’s gathering of phone call logs under the USAPATRIOT Act. The National Security Agency stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years. Unlike the National Security Agency data, the Hemisphere data include information on the locations of callers.
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 4 billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more thanone record.
The slides were given to The New York Times by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist in Port Hadlock, Wash. He said he had received the PowerPoint presentation, which is unclassified but marked “Law enforcement sensitive,” in response to a series of public-information requests to West Coast police agencies.
The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.
“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or congressional hearings.
President Barack Obama’s administration acknowledged the extraordinary scale of the Hemisphere database and the unusual embedding of AT&T employees in government drug units in three states.
But administration members said the project, which has proved especially useful in finding criminals who discard cellphones frequently to thwart government tracking, employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.
Crucially, they said, the phone data are stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the National Security Agency’s 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 DEA.
Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations.”
Fallon said that “the records are maintained at all times by the phone company, not the government,” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone company so law enforcement can quickly keep up with drug dealers when they switch phone numbers to try to avoid detection.”
He said that the program was paid for by the DEA and the White House drug policy office but that the cost was not immediately available.
Officials said four AT&T employees are now working in what is called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which brings together DEA and local investigators - two in the program’s Atlanta office and one each in Houston and Los Angeles.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the 27-slide PowerPoint presentation, evidently updated this year to train AT&T employees for the program, “certainly raises profound privacy concerns.”
“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.
Jaffer said that while the database remained in AT&T’s possession, “the integration of government agents into the process means there are serious Fourth Amendment concerns.”
Hendricks said the Power-Point presentation came from “a major metropolitan police department,” but he did not want to be more specific because he thinks that it was sent by mistake, and he does not want the official responsible to get in trouble. Federal officials confirmed that the slides are authentic.
He filed the public-records requests while assisting other activists who have filed a federal lawsuit saying that a civilian intelligence analyst at an Army base near Tacoma, Wash., infiltrated and spied on anti-war groups.
Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, declined to answer more than a dozen detailed questions, including ones about what percentage of phone calls made in the United States were covered by Hemisphere, the size of the Hemisphere database, whether the AT&T employees working on Hemisphere had security clearances and whether the company has conducted any legal review of the program
“While we cannot comment on any particular matter, we, like all other companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law enforcement,” Siegel wrote in an email.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 09/02/2013