Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing NSA's
02 September 13
For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counter narcotics 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.
