The Hemisphere Project: full transcription
// 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 →The AT&T-run program collects information on every call that passed through one of its systems, including by other cell carriers and network providers. The database contains call records dating back three decades, including the location of callers, and provides IMSI and IMEI numbers to identify callers. Some four billion call records are swept into the database each day.
We would prefer that the information obtained from the unit not be used in any affidavit going to the court.
DEA officials were instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document.
The DEA failed to conduct a comprehensive legal analysis prior to using its administrative subpoena authority, and agents may need a higher authority to access the data than an agency-issued subpoena, which does not require judicial oversight.
This transcription covers the program's confirmed scale, AT&T's own internal instruction regarding court filings, the directive to avoid documenting the program's use, and the Justice Department's internal legal concerns. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's full case file contains hundreds of additional pages obtained through two separate FOIA lawsuits.
Program: Hemisphere Project, DEA and AT&T. Active since 2007.
Full case file and FOIA documents, Electronic Frontier Foundation →
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