 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
The Hemisphere Project, also known as Hemisphere (codenamed Hudson Hawk), [1] is a mass surveillance program conducted by US telecommunications company AT&T and funded by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). [2]
Hemisphere is a public–private partnership between the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and AT&T, the third-largest provider of mobile telephone services in the US. [1] [3] In 2013 the programme was overseen by AT&T employees embedded within the Atlanta head office (two employees) and Houston and Los Angeles regional offices (one employee each) of the ONDCP's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) programme; these employees' salaries are paid through the ONDCP's HIDTA program, as opposed to by AT&T. [1] [2]
AT&T collects metadata relating to all calls routed through AT&T's exchanges, including calls made from non-AT&T handsets. The data collected include the phone numbers of the caller and recipient, the date, time and length of calls and, in some cases, a caller's location. An estimated four billion new call detail records are created on AT&T's database every day, though it is possible for a call to be recorded more than once. As AT&T maintains records of calls placed as well as calls received, a single call may be recorded against both the caller's telephone number (as an outgoing call) and the recipient's telephone number (as an incoming call); the number of records generated for a single call depends on its length, as well as on participants' locations and whether or not they are moving. Call detail records held as part of the project date back as far as 1987. [1] [2] [4] [5]
Data are typically forwarded to investigators by email in response to administrative subpoenas, which the DEA is authorised to issue independently of the courts. As the existence of the project is officially secret, investigators are not permitted to disclose the source of any intelligence obtained through the Hemisphere Project in case reports, court filings or other documents. Official guidance instead requires all intelligence be cited as “information obtained from an AT&T subpoena”. [1]
Requests for urgent information from the project database take as little as an hour to fulfil. [5] [6]
The partnership between AT&T and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) commenced in 2007, [2] and data within the Hemisphere Project database extends as far back as 1987. [1] In September 2013, an unnamed law enforcement official mentioned that they rarely needed to access data older than 18 months. [5]
In 2013, activist Drew Hendricks brought the Hemisphere Project to public attention by obtaining a verified 27-slide PowerPoint presentation labeled "law enforcement sensitive" through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. This presentation included lists of individuals identified as suspects based on data from the project's database. While law enforcement initially portrayed the project as primarily focused on monitoring and collecting call records related to drug-related activities in standard criminal investigations, [5] it included individuals unrelated to drug offenses. These individuals encompassed cases such as a person impersonating a military general, injuring an intelligence officer at a San Diego Navy facility; a South Carolina resident accused of making bomb threats; and a group involved in a theft incident at a Los Angeles jewelry store. [2] [7]
The White House contended that the Hemisphere Project's data did not raise privacy concerns, although Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) expressed skepticism regarding this claim. [6] [8]
The program led to discussions drawing parallels with legislative suggestions made in response to the revelations related to the "Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management" (PRISM). Notably, Representative Adam Schiff proposed a solution wherein phone companies would retain their data. [9]
Spokespeople for Sprint, Verizon and T-mobile USA would not comment on whether their companies offered similar services. [2]
In November 2023, a WIRED report disclosed that the Hemisphere Project, now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS), has facilitated access to an unprecedented volume of domestic phone records within the United States, even for individuals unconnected to criminal activities. This government initiative, in collaboration with AT&T, has raised significant legal and privacy concerns, allowing federal, state, and local enforcement agencies to scrutinize trillions of domestic phone records. [10]
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, in a letter dated November 20, 2023, addressed to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, called for the release of additional information regarding the Hemisphere Project. He expressed profound reservations about the program's legality, revealing that it has provided law enforcement authorities with the ability to conduct extensive searches of domestic phone records, often without the need for warrants. [11]
The WIRED report cites the concerns raised by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden providing insight into the Hemisphere Project's data access and its legal implications. [10]
The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), also called the FISA Court, is a U.S. federal court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT). The NSA is also tasked with the protection of U.S. communications networks and information systems. The NSA relies on a variety of measures to accomplish its mission, the majority of which are clandestine. The NSA has roughly 32,000 employees.
Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing, or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted information like Internet traffic. Increasingly, governments may also obtain consumer data through the purchase of online information, effectively expanding surveillance capabilities through commercially available digital records. It can also include simple technical methods, such as human intelligence gathering and postal interception.
Computer and network surveillance is the monitoring of computer activity and data stored locally on a computer or data being transferred over computer networks such as the Internet. This monitoring is often carried out covertly and may be completed by governments, corporations, criminal organizations, or individuals. It may or may not be legal and may or may not require authorization from a court or other independent government agencies. Computer and network surveillance programs are widespread today and almost all Internet traffic can be monitored.
The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to U.S. national security by achieving "Total Information Awareness" (TIA).
Total Information Awareness (TIA) was a mass detection program by the United States Information Awareness Office. It operated under this title from February to May 2003 before being renamed Terrorism Information Awareness.
A pen register, or dialed number recorder (DNR), is a device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line. The term has come to include any device or program that performs similar functions to an original pen register, including programs monitoring Internet communications.
MAINWAY is a database maintained by the United States' National Security Agency (NSA) containing metadata for hundreds of billions of telephone calls made through the largest telephone carriers in the United States, including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
ThinThread was an intelligence gathering project by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) conducted throughout the 1990s. The program involved wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data. The program was discontinued three weeks before the September 11, 2001 attacks due to the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence authority.
PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC and Apple under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms. Among other things, the NSA can use these PRISM requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier, and to get data that is easier to handle.
The practice of mass surveillance in the United States dates back to wartime monitoring and censorship of international communications from, to, or which passed through the United States. After the First and Second World Wars, mass surveillance continued throughout the Cold War period, via programs such as the Black Chamber and Project SHAMROCK. The formation and growth of federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA institutionalized surveillance used to also silence political dissent, as evidenced by COINTELPRO projects which targeted various organizations and individuals. During the Civil Rights Movement era, many individuals put under surveillance orders were first labelled as integrationists, then deemed subversive, and sometimes suspected to be supportive of the communist model of the United States' rival at the time, the Soviet Union. Other targeted individuals and groups included Native American activists, African American and Chicano liberation movement activists, and anti-war protesters.
During the 2010s, international media reports revealed new operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly relate to top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents consist of intelligence files relating to the U.S. and other Five Eyes countries. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published, with further selected documents released to various news outlets through the year.
This is a category of disclosures related to global surveillance.
Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders.
The Fourth Amendment Protection Acts, are a collection of state legislation aimed at withdrawing state support for bulk data (metadata) collection and ban the use of warrant-less data in state courts. They are proposed nullification laws that, if enacted as law, would prohibit the state governments from co-operating with the National Security Agency, whose mass surveillance efforts are seen as unconstitutional by the proposals' proponents. Specific examples include the Kansas Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act and the Arizona Fourth Amendment Protection Act. The original proposals were made in 2013 and 2014 by legislators in the American states of Utah, Washington, Arizona, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and California. Some of the bills would require a warrant before information could be released, whereas others would forbid state universities from doing NSA research or hosting NSA recruiters, or prevent the provision of services such as water to NSA facilities.
The USA Freedom Act is a U.S. law enacted on June 2, 2015, that restored and modified several provisions of the Patriot Act, which had expired the day before. The act imposes some new limits on the bulk collection of telecommunication metadata on U.S. citizens by American intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency. It also restores authorization for roving wiretaps and tracking lone wolf terrorists. The title of the act is a ten-letter backronym that stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act of 2015.
The FISA Improvements Act is a proposed act by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Prompted by the disclosure of NSA surveillance by Edward Snowden, it would establish the surveillance program as legal, but impose some limitations on availability of the data. Opponents say the bill would codify warrantless access to many communications of American citizens for use by domestic law enforcement.
Proposed reforms of mass surveillance by the United States are a collection of diverse proposals offered in response to the Global surveillance disclosures of 2013.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report on mass surveillance was issued in January 2014 in light of the global surveillance disclosures of 2013, recommending the US end bulk data collection.
[Jaffer] said that the Hemisphere Project raised 'profound privacy concerns,' [...]
 | This corporation or company article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
