Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing NSA’s

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.

Under the Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T, the government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987. The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the NSA’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.