AT&T and the DEA partner to create a database which might dwarf the NSA’s

 It appears as if the NSA is not the only government agency accessing personal phone records using blanket subpoenas in possible violation of the fourth amendment. The DEA has been doing much the same:

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.

  But that is not all: AT&T has actually partnered with the DEA in this effort:

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. 

  And as this article states, this is a much larger program than any other to date:

The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years.

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 four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.

  The Obama regime is defending this program by stating that it is AT&T and not the government which is storing all this information on Americans, but when the government has instant access to the information using blanket subpoenas I fail to see what difference it makes who is storing the data. Where the data is stored is not what is at issue here, what is at issue is this: Who has the access to this information and are our fourth amendment rights being violated? That is all that really matters when you come right down to it.

  The ACLU actually shares my concerns about this revelation:

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.

Mr. 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.”

  I could not agree more: If this program is as benign as the government would have us believe why was the program secret in the first place? Obviously the government knows the case for this program is dubious at best.

  Can there be any doubt left that Americans are now living in a soft police state? When are Americans, and the Congress, going to step up and say enough is enough?