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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.
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 Drug Enforcement Administration is a United States federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Justice tasked with combating illicit drug trafficking and distribution within the U.S. It is the lead agency for domestic enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act, sharing concurrent jurisdiction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. However, the DEA has sole responsibility for coordinating and pursuing U.S. drug investigations both domestically and internationally.
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), also known as the "Digital Telephony Act," is a United States wiretapping law passed in 1994, during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
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.
The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) is a component of the Executive Office of the President of the United States.
The United States National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC), established in 1993, was a component of the U.S. Department of Justice and a member of the Intelligence Community. The General Counterdrug Intelligence Plan, implemented in February 2000, designated NDIC as the nation's principal center for strategic domestic counterdrug intelligence.
The High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program is a drug-prohibition enforcement program run by the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy. It was established in 1990 after the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 was passed. The HIDTA program was made permanent through Title III of the Office of National Drug Control Policy Reauthorization Act of 2006.
The Terrorist Surveillance Program was an electronic surveillance program implemented by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was part of the President's Surveillance Program, which was in turn conducted under the overall umbrella of the War on Terrorism. The NSA, a signals intelligence agency, implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person. In 2005, The New York Times disclosed that technical glitches resulted in some of the intercepts including communications which were "purely domestic" in nature, igniting the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. Later works, such as James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, described how the nature of the domestic surveillance was much, much more widespread than initially disclosed. In a 2011 New Yorker article, former NSA employee Bill Binney said that his colleagues told him that the NSA had begun storing billing and phone records from "everyone in the country."
Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to conceal how an investigation actually began.
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.
A phone log is metadata collected from telephone or mobile phones for the purpose of surveillance or espionage. This metadata may include: length of calls, phone numbers of both parties, phone-specific identification information, GPS location, call proximity, and/or computer converted voice-to-text transcripts of the phone call conversation. The advantage of converting audio to ASCII text metadata is that this makes it easy to search for keywords and phrases, and ASCII text metadata can be easily stored on conventional database systems for several years. Phone logs are not limited to governmental collection. For example, some private sector companies, such as banks, are known to collect phone log data on their internal phone network of all calls within and between the company and outside parties.
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.
Ongoing news reports in the international media have revealed operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly emanate from a cache of top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, which he obtained whilst working for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest contractors for defense and intelligence in the United States. In addition to a trove of U.S. federal documents, Snowden's cache reportedly contains thousands of Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand intelligence files that he had accessed via the exclusive "Five Eyes" network. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published simultaneously by The Washington Post and The Guardian, attracting considerable public attention. The disclosure continued throughout 2013, and a small portion of the estimated full cache of documents was later published by other media outlets worldwide, most notably The New York Times, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Der Spiegel (Germany), O Globo (Brazil), Le Monde (France), L'espresso (Italy), NRC Handelsblad, Dagbladet (Norway), El País (Spain), and Sveriges Television (Sweden).
This is a category of disclosures related to global surveillance.
Global surveillance refers to the practice of globalized mass surveillance on entire populations across national borders. Although its existence was first revealed in the 1970s and led legislators to attempt to curb domestic spying by the National Security Agency (NSA), it did not receive sustained public attention until the existence of ECHELON was revealed in the 1980s and confirmed in the 1990s. In 2013 it gained substantial worldwide media attention due to the global surveillance disclosure by Edward Snowden.
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,' [...]
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