US law enforcement agencies are continuing to use a dragnet surveillance program that utilizes a database of trillions of records of domestic phone calls as far back as 1987, new findings have revealed.
According to a letter sent by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) which asks for permission to share information about the program with the public, the program previously named “Hemisphere” is devoid of congressional oversight and is often used by law enforcement with a warrant or other form of judicial review.
The Hemisphere program was first revealed in 2013 after a citizen activist discovered the program through routine public records requests which he shared with media outlets. That disclosure also revealed that nearly 4 billion records are added to the database every day.
The size and extent of the database utilized by the Hemisphere program is said to far exceed even the National Security Agency’s spying program under the Patriot Act that was revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013.
Described in internal law enforcement communications as “AT&T’s Super Search Engine” the program allows law enforcement to query the records of phone calls of any call that utilizes AT&T’s nationwide infrastructure, including customers of other phone carriers.
The program not only targets suspects and people they communicate with, but it also tracks anyone who communicates with those individuals, the vast majority of whom are not suspected of committing any crime.
In his letter, Wyden asks for permission to share information that he says would “justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress” and questions the legality of the program.
Hemisphere was renamed to the more innocuous Data Analytical Services (DAS) after its reveal in 2013 and has since been funded by a grant program from the National Drug Control Policy’s High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program, but the program was not exclusively used in drug cases.
As Wyden notes in his letter, if the program were funded directly from a department, then it would have been subject to greater scrutiny, including the Department of Justice’s Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties, with its findings made public.
Since the program is essentially run by the White House, it is also not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.
AT&T declined to comment when reached by US media, only noting it is obligated to comply with legal subpoenas, but there is no law that requires telecom providers to store records for that long or extensively, and the database utilized by Hemisphere is far more extensive than those stored by other companies. The government has also paid AT&T millions of dollars over the past decade to continue the project.
17 November 2023, 02:52 GMT
A wide range of law enforcement agencies have utilized the program, including the California Highway Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US Postal Service and the National Guard.
However, the true extent it was utilized may never be fully understood. One slide included in training materials for the program titled “Protecting the Program” instructed officers to “never refer to Hemisphere in any official documents” and instructed them to claim information found using the program “as information obtained from an AT&T subpoena.”
Slide From Training Powerpoint for Hemisphere Program
© Office of National Drug Control Policy
The tactic, called “parallel subpoenaing” or “parallel construction” means that police would use the program to find information and then issue a second subpoena requesting the same information using traditional methods. This conceals the process used to obtain information in a court case from judges, defendants and their lawyers as well as the public.
Wyden and other lawmakers introduced a bill earlier this month called the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would close many of the legal loopholes that allow the DSA to operate without oversight and would effectively make it illegal in its current form.
If passed, the bill will also reform the spying program run by the NSA under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enabled the mass surveillance of Americans and the storage of their electronic communications by the US Government.