H/t reader M.G.:
“On another topic….NSA information available to DEA. Many DEA officers are criminals working for the DEA to turn their friends in. In return, they walk free, and continue their lives of crime. Nothing can be done to stop them.
The DEA has some of the worst criminals in the nation, now they have access to NSA spying records. Can you imagine the blackmail schemes and extortion that can come out of that information?
Check it out. From the UK Guardian (of course), nothing this truthful will be found on US news sites, except your’s and one or two others who are brave enough to stick with the truth…………maybe Democracynow.org, or Mother Jones.”
Related info:
As the NYT reports, every call that crosses through an AT&T switch, not just calls made by AT&T customers which means virtually every US phone call, is recorded in a formerly top secret AT&T database that has existed since 1987 and whose “scale and longevity of data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act.”
It is a database which adds 4 billion call records every single day and which unlike the N.S.A.’s also includes information on the location of callers.
In other words, before the NSA was recording every phone call, that task was being handled by another entity: AT&T. The cover back then, just like the Patriot Act is the cover for the continuation of the NSA’s espionage operation against America’s own people, so Hemisphere was in collaboration with counternarcotics agents and federal and local drug officials. And of course, just like with the NSA and its utmost secrecy, there is no way to monitor and observe what if any checks on the violation of privacy rights exists.
AT&T database includes every phone call which passes through the carrier’s infrastructure – not just those made by company’s own customers. Photograph: AFP
– US drug agency partners with AT&T for access to ‘vast database’ of call records (Guardian, Sep 2, 2013):
Hemisphere project, revealed by NYT, has AT&T employees sit alongside drug units to aid access to data in exchange for payment
US law enforcement officers working on anti-drugs operations have had access to a vast database of call records dating back to 1987, supplied by the phone company AT&T, the New York Times has revealed.
The project, known as Hemisphere, gives federal and local officers working on drug cases access to a database of phone metadata populated by more than four billion new call records each day.
Read moreUS Drug Agency Partners With AT&T For Access To ‘Vast Database’ Of Call Records
