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.
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.
The project comes to light at a time of vigorous public debate over the
proper limits on government surveillance and on the relationship between
government agencies and communications companies. It offers the most
significant look to date at the use of such large-scale data for law
enforcement, rather than for national security.
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