The New York Times last
night published an
article that should put to rest the debate over whether we live
in a free country. We don’t:

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a
counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas,
to an enormous ATT 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 ATT that has not previously been reported,
involves an extremely close association between the government and
the telecommunications giant.

The government pays ATT 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.

Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an ATT
switch — not just those made by ATT 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.

How is this even remotely legal in a country
whose
Constitution secures “the right of the people to be secure in
their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures,” meaning a search or seizure without a
warrant based “upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched,
and the persons or things to be seized”? Through the pernicious
PATRIOT Act innovation in unchecked police power known as “administrative
subpoeanas,” so called because the administration can just
issue them at will. (Read Jacob Sullum’s prescient piece from Sept.
11, 2003 titled “Greasing
the Slippery Slope.”)

It also helps that the federal government has granted
telecommunications companies
immunity from their own violated customers, which has allowed
Big Data to be co-opted fully by the Surveillance State. And as
always, the program was also enabled through its intentional
concealment from the public: 

“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in
any official document,” one
slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference
to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.

Well, at least one government body screwed up the “never refer
to Hemisphere” order: Harris County,
Texas, home to Houston and 4.1 million residents. A Google
search on “Operation Hemisphere” and “ATT” at .gov sites turns
up
six records, all from Harris County. They include:

* An October
7, 2008 “Request by the Sheriff for authorization
to….Accept additional 2008 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area
Grant funds from the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the
amount of $950,000 to support the Houston Intelligence Support
Center’s Operation Hemisphere to interdict illegal drug
trafficking.” 

* A January
8, 2010 “Request for approval of sole source, personal
services, and other exemptions from the competitive bid process
for….ATT in the amount of $391,172 for Operation Hemisphere
investigative services for the Sheriff’s Department.”

* A February
8, 2010 audit listing “Operation Hemisphere 2008” as a “direct
program” from the Office of National Drug Control Policy, totaling
$910,705.

* A July 23,
2010 “Request for approval of sole source, personal and
professional services, and other exemptions from the competitive
bid process for…. ATT in the amount of $469,407 for
Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the Sheriff’s
Department.”

* A February
4, 2011 “Request for approval of sole source, Community
and Economic Development, and other exemptions from the competitive
bid process for…. ATT sole source for Operation Hemisphere,
formerly Hudson Hawk, investigative services for the Sheriff’s
Department in the amount of $924,500.”

* A May 7,
2012 “Request for approval of sole source exemptions from
the competitive bid process with…. ATT in the amount of
$762,111 for Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the
Sheriff’s Department for the period ending June 30, 2012.”

So we’re talking around $900,000 a year to gobble up the phone
records of 1.3% of United States. And if it was up to your
government, we wouldn’t know anything about this at all.

The October
issue of Reason, which is dropping now in subscribers’
mailboxes (subscribe
now!), has the cover line “BE PARANOID: They’re reading your
email, tracking your phone, and sending in drones.” As happens all
too often these days, unfolding events have turned out to be even
worse than we thought. Was it really only a month ago when
President Obama told Jay Leno that “There
is no spying on Americans“?