In view of the fact that in 2007, local police detectives and DEA agents have had standard access to a gigantic database which contains thorough records of all American phone call that’s passed through an AT&T switch in the past 26 years.
AT&T employees are paid to work alongside drug-enforcement officers stationed in three states, by the program that is named as the Hemisphere Project. As per the report in the New York Times, the Hemisphere Project embarked in 2007 and carried out in secret since then. The database that goes back to 1987 includes information about every call that’s gone through an AT&T switch.
That information will include user’s time and duration of calls, phone numbers and their location. In contrast the Patriot Act will be allowing the NSA to store five years worth of caller information, that can only include phone numbers and the time and duration of calls. Approximately 4 billion new calls are added to the database each day.
The deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Jameel Jaffer told the Times that he speculates 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. A statement was released by the Justice Department to defend the program, accentuating the fact that the phone data is stored by AT&T and not by government. A Justice
Department spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement that subpoenaing drug dealer’s phone records is just a bread-and-butter approach in the course of criminal examination. Mr. Fallon said that The records are maintained at all times by the phone company and not by the government and that Hemisphere purely streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone corporation so law enforcement can rapidly keep up with drug dealers when they exchange phone numbers to try to avoid detection.
However, the representatives from other major phone companies that include Sprint and T-Mobile declined to respond the questions asked by Times about whether they were involved with similar programs.