back to article US govt pays AT&T to let cops search Americans' phone records – 'usually' without a warrant

A senator has complained that American law enforcement agencies snoop on US citizens and residents, seemingly without regard for the privacy provisions of the Fourth Amendment, under a secret program called the Hemisphere Project that allows police to conduct searches of trillions of phone records. According to Senator Ron …

  1. Dostoevsky Bronze badge

    Not surprising...

    ...given how unaccountable our current leaders feel they are. Also noteworthy that some of our current leaders first took office in the 80s...

  2. trindflo Silver badge
    Facepalm

    tying things together

    "can be used to identify alternate numbers used by a target, obtain location data and 'two levels of call detail records for one target number'.”

    I can't imagine what could go wrong with this and a hallucinating AI.

    1. Version 1.0 Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: tying things together

      Well that has the potential to start to allow the prosecution of spam callers, I get a spam call about every hour - this is a serious response, my serious joke response is to tell every spam caller that they need to focus which results in the non AI callers hanging up.

      If searching everyone's phone records finally stopped spam calling then I expect this would be accepted everywhere, making most non-criminal active people so much more comfortable

      1. MiguelC Silver badge

        Re: tying things together

        To misquote (or misparaphrase) Benjamin Franklin, those who would give up privacy to purchase a little temporary quietness, deserve neither one nor the other.

  3. Potemkine! Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    Whatever the media, whatever the country, always expect somebody else is listening. This will be more often true than false.

  4. Tubz Silver badge
    Big Brother

    US of A$$ has now surpassed Soviet Union, China and ex-Nazis Germany for state surveillance of it's population and now the leader. Land of the free, only if you have power and can afford that freedom !

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      9-11 was the perfect pretext to seize control over American citizens, turn America into a secret police state. And so it has come to pass.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They admit that they hand over information when there is a subpoena, warrant or court order.

    "Like all companies, we are required by law to comply with subpoenas, warrants and court orders from government and law enforcement agencies."

    But for some reason they don't deny that they ALSO hand over information without subpoenas, warrants and court orders.

    1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
      Devil

      Warrants?

      As in "warrant of payment"?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No mention of "burner" phones......

    ....so I guess the use of "burners" is likely to go up!

    Thank you, Ron Wyden!

    ....but, of course, there's always the problem of a "burner" call to one of the non-anonymous numbers tracked by AT&T.

    So....that's settled then......always call "burner" to "burner"!

  7. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    AT&T is anti privacy

    Not only does AT&T violate your privacy in this way, they developed the initial version of the R program language to help the feds violate your privacy. by doing statistical analysis of call records (and that was in the 1990s so this wasn't some "post 9-11 lets give up our privacy" thing.

  8. MachDiamond Silver badge

    Warrant or no warrant

    If AT&T is willing to hand over records of their own free will, there isn't the requirement for a warrant. A warrant is a court order to allow a search or to divulge some information. Subpoenas are a problem. So many entities can be given the power to subpoena things that it's simple to abuse. With a warrant, the request has to be approved by a judge and requires some sort of evidence showing good cause. I'd like to see that when judges sign off on a warrant, their backside is on the line as well. In the US there are far too many cases of 4am door-kicker raids where the person being sought moved out months previously or it's the wrong address on the warrant. Going by the cop shows when they do this, to a person being jolted from sleep, there's no difference between the police coming in or a gang of home invasion robbers with everybody screaming and making a load of noise. In a land with so many firearms at the ready, who would guess this could cause injuries and death. I can recall one case where it didn't seem the person on the warrant would be all that hard to just walk up to and take into custody.

  9. I miss PL/1

    Given the FISA abuses, it's good that Wyden is looking into this. Never trust the govt.

  10. ITS Retired

    How much better would the Internet function

    if there was not all this snooping by so many different entities, cluttering up the Internet by snooping on so many people just going about their normal lives.

    Yeah I know this is AT&T, but they make heavy use of the Internet for their phone call traffic and their own snooping also.

  11. workrabbit

    The drug trafficking business is big business

    Imagine the financial repercussions to funding of law enforcement agencies and their suppliers if most drugs were made legal.

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