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posted by martyb on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the data-wants-to-be...-sold? dept.

Even after the gravesite was discovered and McStay's DNA was found inside Merritt's vehicle, police were far from pinning the quadruple homicide on him.

Until they turned to Project Hemisphere.

Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why.

"Merritt was in a position to access the cellular telephone tower northeast of the McStay family gravesite on February 6th, 2010, two days after the family disappeared," an affidavit for his girlfriend's call records reports Hemisphere finding (PDF). Merritt was arrested almost a year to the date after the McStay family's remains were discovered, and is awaiting trial for the murders.

In 2013, Hemisphere was revealed by The New York Times and described only within a Powerpoint presentation made by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Times described it as a "partnership" between AT&T and the U.S. government; the Justice Department said it was an essential, and prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool.

However, AT&T's own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud.

Hemisphere isn't a "partnership" but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company's massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.

So, AT&T's one stipulation is a pinky swear with law enforcement that their program won't cause them public embarrassment.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:18PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:18PM (#419080)

    There's a difference between your scenarios and what AT&T is doing. And it all comes down to a critical phrase in Fourth Amendment law, expectation of privacy [cornell.edu].

    In your example, there's absolutely no expectation of privacy for any of my actions during a sporting event except maybe going to the bathroom. There are thousands of people who can see most everything I do, and it's even possible a media outlet's camera could happen to be watching me at any given moment, broadcasting what I'm doing to the entire stadium plus everybody watching on TV. Thus, the police don't need any kind of warrant to get any kind of evidence they like about my activities in a stadium.

    For AT&T though, there is generally an expectation of privacy when it comes to web browsing or phone conversation (this has been established by courts), so what they're doing constitutes illegal wiretapping. Of course, the odds that the law enforcement agencies go after them for this - or any of the other nasty stuff they've pulled - is approximately zero.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @10:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @10:28PM (#419185)

    For AT&T though, there is generally an expectation of privacy when it comes to web browsing or phone conversation (this has been established by courts), so what they're doing constitutes illegal wiretapping.

    You aren't doing anyone any favors by misrepresenting what's going on here.
    There is meta-data mining, not wiretapping. There are no recorded phone conversations nor are there copies of the web-pages, just server addresses.
    The problem is that meta-data mining is not restricted in the way actual wiretapping is. By making it sound like this is about wiretapping you are giving them a free pass for the actual intrusions. We need meta-data mining to have the same protections as data mining.

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Thursday October 27 2016, @12:51AM

      by Thexalon (636) on Thursday October 27 2016, @12:51AM (#419228)

      Here's the thing: If they have a copy of the URL, and they have the Wayback Machine [archive.org], then they effectively have exactly what you are reading.

      Also, while they *say* they aren't recording calls, there's nothing technically capable of stopping them from doing so, and you don't know about it if it's happening.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.