It's chilling that they explicitly mention parallel construction on page 12:<p><i>When a complete set of CDRs are subpoenaed from the carrier, then all memorialized references to relevant and pertinent calls can be attributed to the carrier's records, thus "walling off" the information obtained from Hemisphere. In other words, Hemisphere can easily be protected if it is used as a pointer system to uncover relevant numbers.</i>
This is a story NYT broke in 2013:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-phone-trove-eclipsing-nsas.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-ph...</a><p>Obviously, this is deeply fucked up.
The simple truth is this: Anyone who supports the war on drugs as it is currently being run has abandoned what the US stood for at its founding regarding liberty, freedom, and the rule of law.
Wow. We actually have secret police in America. I didn't really put together what that means until now.<p>There are 'law enforcement' agencies that operate outside the law, and they fight to keep their very existence from being exposed in court. Thats crazy.
Our country is full of police departments that fund themselves through seizures of drug money, that they know about by using data our intelligence services collected on us.<p>I wonder who's using the phone data to buy and sell stocks? Maybe that's what they'll get into once we legalize marijuana.
Sidebar: for all the ranting that deserves to be done here, it's also interesting to note that this was an internal IT program, like many other programs I suspect HN readers may have participated in. There was a help desk, a POC, a procedure to follow, and so on.<p>They didn't want the average Law Enforcement schmuck calling operations! Instead you had to contact your POC. They were probably afraid of being overwhelemed by call volume. Turnaround looks like a couple of hours on a good day. In addition, they were doing one of those "train the trainer" things where they were looking at using the POCS to create "super users" to work the system and work with the local folks. Must have been a real concern about volume and support. Gad, how many people were (are) using this thing, anyway?<p>Email was the preferred medium of response, so no online app, at least as far as end-users go. In addition, there was a section about "deconfliction" which was a bit confusing to me, but I never took the training. Was there training? I wonder if, along with this deck, there wasn't a 1-day or 2-day class? If so, who was sent to take it?<p>It always surprises me that when you see something really bad, how normal it all looks and acts. I can just see a conference room at some Holiday Inn full of regular-looking middle-aged folks, slurping up bad coffee and stale donuts, wondering if they were going to be let out early while some other guy putzes around with a MacBook and a projector and an assistant hands out TS/SCI forms.
Let me commend them on the clarity of their writing. When the audiences is themselves it's brisk, vigorous, candid, and refreshingly to the point.<p>Now contrast that with monstrosities like the Affordable Health Care Act, thousands of pages long, nearly impenetrable, and executed without any of the legislators involved actually reading or understanding it.<p>Or the tax code, which is incapable of returning idempotent values when the same functions are applied to identical inputs.
This is a database of call detail records (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record</a>) and the numbers they have called, and numbers that have called them. It does <i>not</i> contain subscriber data (names, account information) - just metadata about calls.<p>They use this database to find cycled phone numbers that have similar calling patterns. (Phone number 1 tends to make and receive calls from number 2, 4, 9 and 13. in geographic area X) Phone number 1 stops making calls, and phone number 50 starts making/receiving calls to 2, 4, 9, and 13 in area Y. So they can assume that whomever owns 50 is the same person that used to own 1 and now they're in area Y.<p>Maybe Im just being clueless today, but can anybody explain to me what is so chilling about this system? I don't see where it can really be abused unless you've got some stalker that works for LA's DEA and they're trying to find out their estranged ex-wife's new phone number?
Doesn't surprise me at all. I've been subject to 'random physical search' in very unexpected situation, twice. Both of those cases were when I had been in (phone) contact in previous days with guys which phones were highly likely to be monitored by law enforcement. - Random isn't nearly as random, as you might think.
Not sure if this will be helpful or considered blogspam, but I tried to summarize and analyze the slide deck here. <a href="http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/97508750503/how-the-dea-covers-up-illegal-evidence-gathering" rel="nofollow">http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/97508750503/how-the-de...</a>