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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.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:43PM
political opponent
the problem with this scheme is we've trained generations of TV viewers to expect much less interesting stories. So the Russians pown a zillion servers a year semi-automatically and they happened to stumble across Hillaries felonious illegal by its very existence server and then all the emails show up on wikileaks. And thats the entire story.
or they think we're so stupid that zillions of gold digging women will supposedly get molested by a candidate decades ago and will all be silent for decades until exactly precisely three weeks before the election when all bazillion of them will simultaneously try to get their fifteen minutes of fame, and we'll be stupid enough to believe all of it and give the election to a known rapist enabler felon because, um because, ... because they think we're stupid, I guess. They already think we're "deplorable" so ...
I mean we "could" do stuff thats more far fetched than the plots in Neuromancer and Snow Crash, as recently discussed on SN, but the general public have been trained to expect stuff that makes the three stooges look smart witty and hip.
The Clinton crime family has an interesting solution to getting framed which is to be so deeply involved in crime that they have an alibi. Bill's like "naw dog I never raped that woman because I was too busy raping that other woman, just ask her, and hillary never did nuthing wrong with that mail server because she was busy covering for me raping the restaurant server" or whatever. Hillary never killed that drug dealer in your imaginary story because she was too busy plotting to kill Seth Rich the guy who leaked information. Everybody knows she's too busy killing that guy everyone knows she had killed, she never done that other thing, no time. Too many bodies to bury. Americans like organized crime kingpins like billy the kid and Dillinger and the Kennedy family and such which explains the appeal of the Clinton crime family so some overly sci fi action adventure flick hollywood plotline might backfire. Like imagine if Oceans 11 were real and Hillary was the mastermind, damn, thats impressive, she'd actually gain votes for that. So every time Bill Clinton rapes yet another girl and Hillary covers it up its kinda a "damn its good to be a gangsta" boost in her numbers.
There is a classic meme (can election memes be classics already?) from the debates where Trump was tearing the Clintons a new hole on TV for being rape enablers and theres a photo snap of Bill and his daughter looking absolutely petrified, and the Bill caption is "I don't remember raping that ugly one" and the Chelsea caption is "Dad... that's Mom". I laughed so hard I was nearly incontinent. Anyway turning a "plot" into laughter as per this paragraph may or may not affect the polls. I don't think it gained Trump any points or Hillary for that matter. So thats yet another way that rather far fetched plot may not be effective may just turn into comedy.