A real database holds every AT&T call since 1987, and lawyers were told never to mention it
This is a bigger phone-records program than the one that caused a national uproar in 2013, and almost nobody has heard of it. Since 2007, AT&T has run a database for the DEA containing records of every call that has passed through its systems going back to 1987, adding roughly four billion new records a day. AT&T employees are physically embedded inside DEA offices to run the searches. A real, FOIA-obtained AT&T attorney email states the company preferred the information "not be used in any affidavit going to the court." Agents were separately instructed to never refer to the program by name in any official document, using a technique called parallel construction to hide its role in building criminal cases.
// Why This Isn’t An Outlier
This document isn’t an isolated case. It’s the same institutional habit the record shows repeating for eighty years.
Build the capability quietly. Use it at a scale the public never approved. Account for it only once a court forces the paperwork into daylight. The Classified Record traces that exact pattern from a 1946 screening memo to the 3.4 million warrantless searches the FBI ran in a single year, using the government’s own documents, not speculation.
Get the book on Amazon →Hemisphere gives law enforcement access to call detail records, phone numbers dialed and received, call time, date, and duration, and in many cases location information, searchable through what internal materials describe as a sophisticated analytical system capable of tracking even "burner" phones swapped specifically to evade detection. Access does not require a warrant. Officers working a case contact a regional hub, in Houston, Atlanta, or Los Angeles, staffed by AT&T employees paid by the federal government, and receive results, reportedly, in some cases, within an hour.
The program was not exposed by a whistleblower or an investigative reporter chasing a tip. A private citizen in Washington state received a routine set of documents through an ordinary public records request and happened to notice a 27-slide PowerPoint describing the program in detail. The New York Times published the first account in September 2013. The Electronic Frontier Foundation subsequently sued the DEA and the California Attorney General's office under FOIA and obtained hundreds of additional pages, confirming that the program had been deliberately renamed at least twice, first to "Project C," later to "Data Analytical Services," specifically to reduce its visibility after the initial exposure.
This establishes that a real, decades-spanning database of Americans' phone call records exists, that it operates without a warrant requirement, that it has been used to build criminal cases through parallel construction specifically designed to prevent defense attorneys and judges from learning its role, and that federal officials formally acknowledged instructing personnel to never document its use. This is confirmed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's FOIA-obtained documents and the Justice Department's own internal watchdog findings.
What this does not establish is the program's exact current operational status. Senator Ron Wyden's office reported in September 2024 that the DEA had stopped funding it, but the underlying technical capability and any successor arrangement with AT&T have not been definitively confirmed as eliminated.
Program: Hemisphere Project, DEA and AT&T. Active since 2007, revealed 2013.
Full case file and FOIA documents, Electronic Frontier Foundation →
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