The NSA’s Warriors on Terror aren’t the only bureaucrats spying on us: so are the Warriors on Drug Users and their accomplices at AT&T. “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…The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years. 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…” Hmmm. And just why is AT&T hanging onto records for almost three decades?

Meanwhile, they’ve kept this anti-constitutional, gargantuan invasion of our privacy secret from us until now. And they call it the “Hemisphere Project,” perhaps indicating their plans for expansion. (Thanks to Mark Luedtke for sending me the story.)

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