Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-phone-trove-eclipsing-nsas.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all

by danso • 13 years ago

335 105 13 years ago

uptown2• 13 years ago

"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."

"Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers."

"Some four billion call records are added to the database every day"

No wonder phone number portability got pushed through.

bandushrew• 13 years ago

man, that makes sense. nice call.

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

It's funny, we thought they went to all that trouble for our benefit. We're a bunch of rubes.

nzealand• 13 years ago

Even if you switch phone numbers, using Hemisphere they can determine your new number. They look for a new phone number calling all your old contacts.

uptown2• 13 years ago

Absolutely. But allowing/encouraging people to keep a single identifier sure makes things easier, and cuts down on your database joins.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

Portability makes it easier for people

This is a side effect and, as other people told it, completely not needed.

Even easier than that, people switch SIM cards but keep the same phone (this may not be very common in the US, still, it happens)

revelation• 13 years ago

This "Protect the Program" stuff sounds like another "Parallel construction" debacle. They are not talking about hiding the program from the public, they are talking about getting the information elsewhere after you used Hemisphere.

Basically, this is a private backyard deal the DEA made with AT&T. Apparently our laws have deteriorated to the point where AT&T lawyers believe they can do this legally.

leokun• 13 years ago

It can't just be AT&T, it must be regional bells, the other major carriers, small companies, everyone.

greglindahl• 13 years ago

?? There are only 2 regional bells now, and one of them is called AT&T.

greenyoda5• 13 years ago

The article notes that:

"Representatives from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile all declined to comment on Sunday in response to questions about whether their companies were aware of Hemisphere or participated in that program or similar ones."

If they were not participating in Hemisphere or similar programs, I'd expect them to be quick to say so.

otoburb• 13 years ago

If they were asked to comment on Sunday (on a weekend), then it's probably more likely that they wanted to confer with their legal departments before denying with any confidence.

This is especially in light of the recent public/media PR confusion with technology companies around PRISM.

greenyoda5• 13 years ago

The article didn't address the question of why AT&T has phone records going back so many years. I doubt that five year old data about a customer would be useful for marketing, considering that they have the most recent data. Nor is old data useful for billing once the time period for contesting a phone bill has elapsed. Network capacity planning could be done with anonymized or aggregated data. So it would seem that the only reason why they hang on to all this data is because the government asks them to, or because they can make money selling it to the government (or both).

Now, think about what adverse effects such old data could have on justice. For example, let's say a friend of mine from school, who I spent a lot of time talking to on the phone a decade ago, decided this year to become a drug dealer. The government could start investigating me based on this stale data, despite not having any reasonable suspicion that I was involved in any crime.

I think that what we really need is a privacy-oriented phone company built on the model of DuckDuckGo, which doesn't keep any data about customers beyond what's necessary for billing purposes. But maybe the U.S. already has laws that would make such an ethical phone company illegal.

rdl3• 13 years ago

I wonder if you could do it as an MVNO.

greenyoda5• 13 years ago

If you operated an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), wouldn't your traffic still be going over AT&T's or some other carrier's network? They'd have access to the information whether you wanted them to or not.

ganeumann2• 13 years ago

The article says that AT&T has data not just on its customer but on any traffic that passes through its switches. I suspect that's much of it.

bigiain4• 13 years ago

Theory #1 – Because deleting stuff at scale is harder than you think. If you've got structured data (think "relational database, much of which is pretty much guaranteed to be append-only") and you've optimised it's on-disk structure for reporting (think "highly indexed, possibly even with both the index data and the transaction data being stored in ways that take advantage of known query patterns and physical disk geometry) – removing data from it is likely to be _much_ more effort than just flipping a "deleted" flag and continuing to expand your storage pool. This is even more true if you'd also need to consider replicated copies/archives/snapshots/backups. Facebook/Google/Twitter et al store everything, not just because they think it'll make them more valuable to advertisers, but because deleting data from distributed/sharded/backedup/archived databases is more expensive than just marking it "deleted" and leaving it in place.

Theory #2 – The NSA (or it's predecessor or a related agency) have been paying them to store whatever they can since whenever it became possible. If you're prepared to ignore the privacy implications, it's obvious that some _tiny_ percentage of that data will become useful for law enforcement purposes. Unfortunately – when the "privacy implications" are considered in terms of "Is _your_ privacy more important than _my_ career?" – it's pretty clear that a very powerful cohort of law enforcement and intelligence agency decision makers say "Hell no! I just need one or two more big successes and I'll get that promotion I want! Of course it's worth monitoring every single person on the planet to give me a shot at the executive bathroom and an office with a door!" (or, less cynically but equal in consequence "Should I listen to every phone conversation in America, if it might possibly mean we can stop the next 9-11? Yeah, I think it might be…").

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

Because deleting stuff at scale is harder than you think.

If you've got an age-based retention policy, and you've built in the capacity to delete the data, not really. Periodic purge. I'm not saying this is trivial, but it's not hard. The system was clearly designed not to delete the data.

Your theory #2 holds much more water.

nohuck13• 13 years ago

Re: theory #1- there are commodity solutions to the queriable data warehouse problem, e.g. Vertica or Greenplum. Looking at these can give you an idea of what might be hard. You've just described Vertica pretty accurately (column-oriented storage, materialised on disk for particular query patterns, ad-hoc deletion comparatively costly). And ageing out in Vertica is easy- you just drop a partition. I can't imagine a custom system would be built without so e provision for this.

aniro2• 13 years ago

27 years ago was 1986.

Are you sure that 27 years worth of data storage within the bulk of that time frame was easier and/or more cost effective than deletion?

bigiain4• 13 years ago

" … let's say a friend of mine from school, who I spent a lot of time talking to on the phone a decade ago, decided this year to become a drug dealer. The government could start investigating me based on this stale data, despite not having any reasonable suspicion that I was involved in any crime."

Next time you're pulled over for a "random traffic stop" or some inexplicably-enforced minor violation (brake lights out, rolling thru a stop sign, singled out in a stream of traffic doing ~10 over on an interstate), I assume the words "parallel construction" will loom large in your mind – along with the memory of that old girlfriend's junkie ex, and your college room-mate's best pal who used to deal weed…

codezero• 13 years ago

Money.

tantalor2• 13 years ago

Because the government requires they retain it.

ganeumann2• 13 years ago

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

If the government pays your salary and you are embedded in the DEA, you are a government employee. Saying these people work for AT&T is patently absurd.

Amadou3• 13 years ago

Exactly. People get so worked up about the technical distinctions, ones that are mostly drawn by the IRS for tax purposes, that they confuse the form for the function.

It is no different than Booz Hamilton "contractors" working on site at NSA and other TLAs. If the money comes from the government and you take direction from the government, even indirectly, you are an agent of the government.

rdl3• 13 years ago

It seems pretty clear that the mobile operators are the biggest commercial organization threats to personal liberty. Their only real competition is the banks.

jlund• 13 years ago

Cash is really easy to use and is accepted everywhere. There's no similarly elegant solution for mobile connectivity if you want to stop revealing metadata information.

greenyoda5• 13 years ago

Well, not really everywhere. If you tried to buy an airline ticket with cash, you'd be subject to a lot of scrutiny.

femto• 13 years ago

Given the number of network connected machines that cash passes though (ATMs, ticket machines, counting machines, ...), I'd assume that such machines would be routinely scanning the serial number of each note. Couple that with an account number, or the CCTV that is usually pointed at any cash handling machine, and I'd posit that the anonymity of cash is eroding.

greenyoda5• 13 years ago

Let's not forget about the big internet companies that participate in PRISM.

hawkharris• 13 years ago

If you haven't already seen The House I Live In, I recommend watching the documentary online. It will change the way you think about drugs and the United States' prison system. The movie doesn't focus specifically on technology, but it explores the by-any-means-necessary approach to law enforcement that helps facilitate things such as the Hemisphere Project mentioned in the story.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0atL1HSwi8

D9u3• 13 years ago

I recently read an article about prisoners who had cell phones from which they posted to their Facebook pages, replete with images of their drugs and snack stashes, even facilitating communications between inmates in different prisons.

It was only after investigative journalists brought the situation to the attention of regulatory agencies that the prisons clamped down on the security breaches within the prisons.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/tennessee-inmates-post...

vinceguidry• 13 years ago

They didn't clamp down on anything. All they did was make an example of them. I bet the other inmates 'helped'. They still have access to cell phones and Facebook, they just are more careful now about this sort of stupidity.

seiji• 13 years ago

Another day, another peek behind the veil of large scale (institutional and codified) data abuse.

We don't have to put up with them poking their fingers in our lives for much longer. We can build around them. We can make them irrelevant. It'll take a more concerted effort than building social networks for cats (where you spend four years of your life posturing about "changing the world" and "being successful" then the next day you cash out for big acquihire fake-success bucks).

Stop studying $FAD_OF_THE_WEEK and go back to your math and ML fundamentals. Play around with it. Build good things. Then build bigger good things. Build good things for good people.

mpyne• 13 years ago

David Simon pointed out something like this when PRISM itself was first leaked. The courts and law enforcement have combined for some pretty incredible types of surveillance and investigation possibilities, and have done so for years and years.

minor_nitwit• 13 years ago

Yet another reason to legalize drugs.

D9u3• 13 years ago

Is there any doubt as to the fascist nature of the USA now?

Call it "corporate cronyism," or "corporate fascism," but whatever it's called, it's no land of the free anymore.

sanderjd2• 13 years ago

Well, unfortunately the word "fascist" isn't particularly meaningful anymore. But there certainly isn't any doubt that Fourth Amendment protections for documents in peoples' homes haven't been considered to be extended to digital communications moving through various service providers' pipes, and that various government agencies have been having a field day with surveillance data they've been able to legally justify collecting based on that lack of Constitutional protection. It seems largely like a widespread failure to create language protecting digital privacy in the same spirit as analog privacy was originally protected. Maybe that's fascism, but it seems less useful to use words without agreed upon meanings.

D9u3• 13 years ago

My bad for using sensational terminology, but the heart of the matter remains.

The privatization and collusion between government and private entities at the expense of We the People has brought the USA to a point where it's obviously become the land of the corporation and the home of the wage-slave.

Lobbyists with vast funding avail their corporate sponsors of representation which is denied to those who lack such deep-pockets.

Only those with similar vast funding are able to attain high level elected positions within our government, from whence they enact legislation which furthers the divide between the plebiscite and the proletariat, which falls right into line with Marxist "liberal-democratic" ideology, where the government becomes the tool of the Bourgeoisie at the expense of the Proles and the Plebes.

This socioeconomic stratification is quite visible in today's USA, and programs such as "Hemisphere" exemplify this situation.

I too find the exclusion of electronic communications from 4th Amendment protections to be an egregious failure of our Constitutional checks and balances, yet due to my own limited understanding of the situation I have always considered our electronic communications to be analogous to the "... papers and effects..." outlined in the 4th Amendment, but my motivations are different from those who have been appointed to interpret our legal structures.

The very notion of "Too big to fail/jail" is yet another example of holding those with vast resources to a different standard when compared to the average Joe Public who worries about how he's going to continue to feed his family as well as keep an acceptable roof over their head.

Where it leaves us is at an increasingly disadvantageous position, unless we are of the Bourgeoisie and able to purchase our way through the system on par with big banks who launder cartel drug profits with impunity; where political appointees can perjure themselves before Congress with impunity; and where every day words are redefined by our public servants as they maneuver their way through the system with similar impunity as relates to their questionable acts.

downandout2• 13 years ago

From the document:

Protecting the Hemisphere program is a formidable challenge. We have taken the following steps to try and keep the program under the radar...

The fact that our government creates and then goes to such great lengths to hide programs that it knows the public (and most likely the courts) will vehemently object to shows the level of contempt that government officials and employees have for the very people they were hired to serve. I don't know that it can be fixed, but it is a very serious problem.

willvarfar• 13 years ago

Maybe they don't want drug pushers and users to know they have this either?

gaius• 13 years ago

Security through obscurity?

legutierr3• 13 years ago

Is this an argument in favor of the practice? Because, honestly, drugs should be legal to sell and to purchase. If all drugs should be legal and if the trade in drugs should be legal, then how can any program like this designed solely to enforce drug laws be justified? In that event, who cares what drug "pushers" and users know?

betterunix3• 13 years ago

I think we need to take a step back and get to the part where it makes sense to use these tactics against drug users.

downandout2• 13 years ago

The point of my comment wasn't that we shouldn't use technology to enforce our laws (though our drug laws are ridiculous and counterproductive). It was that our local, state, and federal governments operate as a collection of thousands of fiefdoms that run for the most part without supervision from any other agency. Each of those fiefdoms can implement programs like this in secret, and no one can challenge them because no one knows about them. Every so often one of these programs is identified and disbanded after years of litigation, but hundreds more will soon appear in its place.

The simplicity of implementing such programs combined with the near impossibility of identifying and eliminating them makes this an insurmountable problem. Our government seems to have adopted the mantra of the criminals they claim to dislike so much: If you don't get caught, it's not illegal.

graycat2• 13 years ago

Fix it? Sure, the US Founding Fathers had all been there, done that, gotten the T-shirt, and showed us how:

(1) Have freedom of the press so that the press can put out the information needed for an informed citizenry.

(2) Have freedom of speech and assembly so that the citizens can learn, discuss, and decide.

(3) Have the Bill of Rights so that the government can't just run roughshod over the citizens.

(4) Have three branches of government so that there can be checks and balances and keep, say, the Executive Branch from becoming dictatorial, self-serving, self-perpetuating, and tyrannical.

(5) Have the President and the Congress elected by the citizens, directly or nearly so and, thus, have them elected out'a there when the citizens don't like them.

Then, presto, to solve the problems, citizens just need to become informed and, then, behind some curtains pull some levers. Done. All the powerful, wealthy, connected, crooked dirt bags in government float belly down down the Potomac River.

Net, we just need to become informed and pull the levers.

And, there's another way: Bring law suits, e.g., citing the Fourth Amendment.

So,

Q. Go to war in Syria?

A. Not without money voted by Congress.

Q. Implement ObamaCare?

A. Not if the citizens and/or courts don't like it.

Q. NSA spying on US citizens?

A. Not if citizens vote to stop that stuff and/or court cases get brought and are successful.

Q. The spying on US citizens as in the OP?

A. Not if citizens don't like it and/or there are suitable court cases.

Q. US Customs taking mobile electronic devices of US citizens and extracting and keeping all the data?

A. Not if, right, the usual, citizens and courts stop it.

Etc.

namlem• 13 years ago

The US government is flawed on a deep constitutional level. The incentive structures and oversight mechanisms are broken. The constitution is pretty much a joke at this point. The founders knew it would become outdated quickly and recommended rewriting it every 25 years or so.

Amadou3• 13 years ago

(1) Have freedom of the press so that the press can put out the information needed for an informed citizenry.

At the time the bill of rights was written, the term "press" did not refer to any sort of news organization. It meant a literal press - the idea was that publication by anyone with the means to publish was not to be restricted.

Nowadays everyone has the modern equivalent of a press so it is unfortunate that the meaning of "press" has been narrowed to a poorly-defined set of semi-official news distributing organizations.

flagnog• 13 years ago

And if none of that was enough, have enough guns to force a regime change.

noarchy• 13 years ago

"Hired to serve", but it brings to mind the following quote from Noam Chomsky, regarding who is being served:

"Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy -- which is their own population,"

superuser23• 13 years ago

It shows contempt for and fear of privacy advocates, who are a small minority of the people they were hired to serve.

rl3• 13 years ago

"Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers."

Unlike the publicly known N.S.A. data.

Also, as if call status matters.

cantrevealname• 13 years ago

Take a look at what happened when the drug dealers were doing the exact same thing:

In a police raid, Cali cocaine cartel leader José Santacruz Londono was found to have assembled a database that contained both the office and residential telephone numbers of U.S. diplomats and agents based in Colombia, along with the entire call log for the phone company in Cali, which was leaked by employees of the utility.

A $1.5 million IBM AS400 mainframe was loaded with custom-written data-mining software. It cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange's traffic with the phone numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement officials. The computer was essentially conducting a perpetual internal mole-hunt of the cartel's organizational chart. Santacruz could see if any of his lieutenants were spilling the beans.

They were. A top Colombian narcotics security adviser says the system fingered at least a dozen informants -- and that they were swiftly assassinated by the cartel.

Ref: http://www.mail-archive.com/eristocracy@merrymeet.com/msg000...

Longer story here: http://cocaine.org/cokecrime/index.html

raldi• 13 years ago

That story can't possibly be true -- he would have only had access to metadata, and I've been told many times that metadata surveillance is completely harmless.

benologist• 13 years ago

The existence of the data would be enough to infer a relationship that shouldn't exist at all.

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

This story alone is reason enough to seriously start working on a program and schedule for:

- legalizing drugs and

- selling them in a controlled environment,

- taxed and

- accompanied by a heavy investment in related education in schools nationwide

...instead of throwing billions at killing our most basic rights.

The example of Portugal: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-d...

mapt• 13 years ago

We already have "related education" mandated as curricula in several different grades in every school system in the country. It's not uncommonly ridiculous propaganda, with blatant urban legends dramatized for your FUD, which is widely rejected by the student body.

What we need is a non-criminalized mental health system that actually functions (addiction neural wiring being a subset of mental illnesses that can be acquired through the victim's actions), and a poverty / diminished capacity safety net that tries to redress problems in the way of marginalized people rejoining civil society.

Essentially everything else would self-resolve after legalization.

tantalor2• 13 years ago

The connection to counternarcotics is a distraction from the real story here. Legalizing drugs changes nothing. The article points this program was used in routine law enforcement, e.g., bomb threats.

I'd like to know more about the "administrative subpoena" process. How often are innocent people's phone logs dumped? Why not just install cameras in the TVs and be done with it?

GabrielF00• 13 years ago

If you look at slide 18, it looks like 96% of requests were for drug cases.

ajb• 13 years ago

"Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program"

The irony of this, is that it's exactly the tactic used by drug dealers. In order to avoid the risk of possessing illegal substances, they coerce drug addicts to hold their stash. The courts call this 'constructive possession'.

Zigurd3• 13 years ago

When they say it goies back to at least 1987, I think they are referring to the Daytona database of call detail records (CDRs). That project was active in the 80's, but it goes back much farther, and it may contain most of the CDRs ever created. In it's early stages, punched cards, and later magnetic tapes, were trucked to Bell Labs and subsequently AT&T Labs, where the Daytona system was operated. In it's heyday it was the biggest database on Earth.

There may be a successor to Daytona by now, and "all the CDRs, ever" is not as impressive as it once was, but it is likely that joint telco/government projects like Daytona have been collecting and analyzing call data since there was call data to analyze.

I would not be surprised if they are still using Daytona's query language.

superuser23• 13 years ago

HN and the internet community reacted with consistent and vigorous outrage towards Facebook and Google for complying with subpoenas, and over unconfirmed rumors and suspicions that they were selling user data to 3rd parties (not just ad targeting internally). We had boycotts and alternatives to try to move off these services.

Where's the boycott of the PSTN? Why aren't we angry at AT&T for actually embedding staff in the government? Why aren't we encouraging people to switch off their services?

Groxx• 13 years ago

Probably because telcoms are already considered the worst offenders, and assumed to be evil? No change to the status quo = no uproar.

coldcode• 13 years ago

I wonder if this system has a search capability or it strictly limited to phone # searches. I also wonder if tech to speech works well enough to convert all these calls to text.

Bulkington• 13 years ago

Key term: administrative subpoena. Judges, we don't need no stinkin' judges.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/administrative-subp...

For the P. Simon inclined, rather than just pointing to the obvious slope we've slipped down since Nixon:

Whoah God only knows, God makes his plan The information's unavailable to the mortal man We're workin' our jobs, collect our pay Believe we're gliding down the highway, when in fact we're slip sliding away...

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/s/simon+and+garfunkel/slip+slidin...

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

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