Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s By SCOTT SHANE and COLIN MOYNIHAN September 1, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-phone-trove-eclipsing-nsas.html 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, . . . 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. The Obama 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 they 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 is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. Mr. Richman said the program at least touched on an unresolved Fourth Amendment question: whether mere government possession of huge amounts of private data, rather than its actual use, may trespass on the amendment’s requirement that searches be “reasonable.” Even though the data resides with AT&T, the deep interest and involvement of the government in its storage may raise constitutional issues, he said. Karl Denninger (who used to run a large ISP and who wrote his own "blog" and forum website software in C) argues that this is equivalent to government seizure of the records and that using this evidence in court cases (or I guess as part of an investigation which leads to a prosecution) without disclosing its source amounts to perjury. http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=224043 - Robin _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
