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The Hemisphere Project, also called simply Hemisphere, is a mass surveillance program conducted by US telephone company AT&T and paid for by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
AT&T employees work alongside the DEA and local law enforcement agencies at High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area offices in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas and Houston, where they supply officials with metadata from a database of telephone calls dating back to 1987. The information is handed over in response to subpoenas, rather than search warrants. The DEA has the power to issue "administrative subpoenas" without involvement of a court. Call detail records are collected for all calls handled by AT&T's switches, not only calls placed by AT&T customers. The records include the caller's location and number around four billion per day. A telephone call may create more than one entry in the database.
The program began in 2007 or earlier, but did not become public until 2013, when activist Drew Hendricks found a Powerpoint file about it among materials turned over in response to a FOIA request. Marked as "law enforcement sensitive", the file gives examples of suspects said to have been found with Hemisphere data. Several of the suspects given as examples were wanted in connection to crimes unrelated to drugs, such as making bomb threats, impersonating a military officer, and theft from a jewelry store.
The White House said that the data raises no privacy concerns, a statement contradicted by Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, who said he would "speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts."
The program was likened to proposals made by legislators after the disclosure of PRISM, in particular one by Representative Adam Schiff who had called for a "look at changing the telephone metadata program by having phone companies retain their own data, rather of [sic] the government."
Spokespeople for Sprint, Verizon and T-mobile USA would not comment on whether their companies offered similar services.