Just two days ago, the New York Times revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration engages in domestic phone surveillance on a scale that may dwarf the snoopy misdeeds of the National Security Agency. Through its Hemisphere Project, the DEA partners with AT&T to trawl through 26 years (and counting) of stored phone data to identify repeating patterns of calls that can identify people even if they frequently change anonymous \u201cburner\u201d phones. That call you make to your bookie every Saturday? Yeah. That\u2019s a give-away, no matter if you make it from different numbers. As Reason\u2019s Matt Welch remarked after the report\u2019s publication, it \u201cshould put to rest the debate over whether we live in a free country. We don\u2019t.\u201d He\u2019s right, though after the headlines of recent months (and the years before) it\u2019s not clear that the matter should still be a subject of debate.<\/p>\n
Why do records of phone calls matter? As the ACLU\u2019s Catherine Crump notes, \u201cWhile people may dispose of their phones, it\u2019s much harder for people to change their lives. If Alice calls Bob twice a day and Carol every Sunday, Alice is likely to do that even if she switches phones. By analyzing calling patterns within the database, it\u2019s possible to identify Alice\u2019s new phone.\u201d Tracking and recording the patterns of our lives is deeply revealing about who we are and how we live.<\/p>\n
The Hemisphere database is searchable only through the issuance of a subpoena\u2014an \u201cadministrative subpoena\u201d that the DEA issues itself. If you\u2019re thinking that\u2019s not much of a safeguard, you\u2019re probably in good company. At least, the feds seem to believe the public at large would find the program off-putting to the public at large. \u201cAll requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,\u201d a slide given to the Times says. The program was revealed almost incidentally in the course of a lawsuit over federal infiltration of antiwar groups.<\/p>\n
Imagine that. Yet another vast and creepy spy program is revealed in the course of a legal challenge to intrusive government targeting of peaceful political activists. That rabbit hole goes deep.<\/p>\n
This comes against a backdrop of months of revelations of NSA surveillance on phone and Internet communications. And that came after news about the secretive Justice Department seizure of Associated Press phone records and the investigation and threatened prosecution of Fox News reporter James Rosen for reporting on stories in a way the government finds inconvenient.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s all this year, and it\u2019s not, by any means, a complete list of the disturbing incursions into personal freedom committed by the federal government.<\/p>\n