
Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove Eclipsing N.S.A.’s - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-phone-trove-eclipsing-nsas.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all
======
cantrevealname
Take a look at what happened when the drug dealers were doing the exact same
thing:

In a police raid, Cali cocaine cartel leader José Santacruz Londono was found
to have assembled a database that contained both the office and residential
telephone numbers of U.S. diplomats and agents based in Colombia, along with
the entire call log for the phone company in Cali, which was leaked by
employees of the utility.

A $1.5 million IBM AS400 mainframe was loaded with custom-written data-mining
software. It cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange's traffic with the phone
numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement
officials. The computer was essentially conducting a perpetual internal mole-
hunt of the cartel's organizational chart. Santacruz could see if any of his
lieutenants were spilling the beans.

They were. A top Colombian narcotics security adviser says the system fingered
at least a dozen informants -- and that they were swiftly assassinated by the
cartel.

Ref: [http://www.mail-
archive.com/eristocracy@merrymeet.com/msg000...](http://www.mail-
archive.com/eristocracy@merrymeet.com/msg00087.html)

Longer story here:
[http://cocaine.org/cokecrime/index.html](http://cocaine.org/cokecrime/index.html)

~~~
raldi
That story can't possibly be true -- he would have only had access to
metadata, and I've been told many times that metadata surveillance is
completely harmless.

~~~
benologist
The existence of the data would be enough to infer a relationship that
shouldn't exist at all.

~~~
mkohlmyr
woosh

~~~
dopamean
I think you were looking for this...
[http://i.imgur.com/YwgbT16.gif](http://i.imgur.com/YwgbT16.gif)

------
downandout
From the document:

 _Protecting the Hemisphere program is a formidable challenge. We have taken
the following steps to try and keep the program under the radar..._

The fact that our government creates and then goes to such great lengths to
hide programs that it knows the public (and most likely the courts) will
vehemently object to shows the level of contempt that government officials and
employees have for the very people they were hired to serve. I don't know that
it can be fixed, but it is a very serious problem.

~~~
willvarfar
Maybe they don't want drug pushers and users to know they have this either?

~~~
legutierr
Is this an argument in favor of the practice? Because, honestly, drugs should
be legal to sell and to purchase. If all drugs should be legal and if the
trade in drugs should be legal, then how can any program like this designed
solely to enforce drug laws be justified? In that event, who cares what drug
"pushers" and users know?

~~~
tinco
Well, honestly, drugs should not be legal to sell and to purchase.

What world are you living in? Do you think these guys deal weed? Have you seen
what (crack) cocaine does to people?

These cocaine pushers are in the business of destroying people, and they
certainly should be apprehended.

~~~
legutierr
Many drugs are horrible and ruin lives. But they ruin fewer lives than do the
laws making the sale and purchase of drugs illegal. If every penny spent on
enforcing drug laws and incarcerating drug sellers and buyers were spent on
education, treatment, and poverty programs, drug use would fall in the United
States by orders of magnitude.

One of the more pernicious effects of making the sale and purchase of drugs
illegal is that people who sell and purchase drugs are sent to prison. Most
people sent to prison for these offenses are themselves addicts either trying
to feed their habit, or to pay for it. These are the people that the drug laws
are intended to protect, no? But as a result of going to prison they:

* are frequently denied effective treatment for their illness, and therefore continue as addicts inside and outside of prison;

* are effectively exiled from the legitimate economy, becoming a burden on society both before and after incarceration, and increasing the likelihood of continued drug use;

* cannot take care of their families, increasing the burden that we all carry that we would not otherwise carry;

* are mixed with a violent element, whose influence will certainly cause many to commit non-drug crimes that they otherwise would not have.

The prisons turn users into addicts and addicts into career criminals.

Some people seem to believe that we need these harsh laws in order to catch,
as you put it, "cocaine pushers" who are "in the business of destroying
people". In fact, narcotraffickers are entirely the creation of US "Drug War"
policies. Decades of supply-side enforcement has made these people so wealthy
that they can purchase entire governments. The government of Mexico, the
world's 14th largest economy, is populated in some percentage at almost every
level by agents of the cartels. It is "Drug War" policies that create the
profits to pay for this corruption.

Demand-side policies along with controlled and regulated distribution of drugs
in the US will decimate the narcotraffickers. Without customers willing to pay
ridiculous margins for their product, they will simply go out of business.
Although some former narcos will attempt to leach off of society through
kidnapping and other crimes, a lack of local community support, money and
political cover will mean that aggressive policing will finally be able to
stomp them out in time.

Also consider the case of Oxycontin, a legal narcotic manufactured by Perdue
Pharma, "a privately held pharmaceutical company founded by physicians and now
located in Stamford, Connecticut". Oxycontin is among the most destructive
drugs today. Oxycontin is primarily acquired by addicts either by getting
doctors to legally prescribe it, or by purchasing excess pills from
individuals to whom it was legally prescribed.

"Drug War" policies are entirely ineffective a combating this kind of
practice; as a result, prescription drug abuse is growing at a faster rate
than nearly all other forms of drug abuse. However, it is almost certain that
addiction-treatment regimes instituted to reduce the use of currently-illegal
drugs will also be effective at reducing the illicit use of currently-legal
drugs.

And if for some reason you think that education and treatment programs can't
have a significant (if not massive) effect on addiction rates, I would ask you
to take a look at the following two data points:

[http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/12/science/la-sci-sn-
ci...](http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/12/science/la-sci-sn-cigarette-
smoking-kids-20130712)

[http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-
decriminal...](http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-
decriminalization-portugal-lessons-creating-fair-successful-drug-policies)

~~~
tinco

        If every penny spent on enforcing drug laws and incarcerating drug sellers and buyers were spent on education, treatment, and poverty programs, drug use would fall in the United States by orders of magnitude.
    

I have no doubt that's true. But even if the war on drugs was stopped, the
money wouldn't go to helping the poor. The U.S. only has right wing parties,
so the money would just end up paying off debt or lowering taxes.

    
    
        One of the more pernicious effects of making the sale and purchase of drugs illegal is that people who sell and purchase drugs are sent to prison. 
        ...
        The prisons turn users into addicts and addicts into career criminals.
    

(hard) Drugs are illegal where I live too (The Netherlands). But we don't have
such harsh laws at all. Possession of drugs means a fine and perhaps a few
days in a cell sobering up.

It is not the war on drugs that is destroying the U.S's lower class, it's the
ridiculous prison sentences. No country in Europe has as many drug related
problems as the U.S., and in no country in Europe drugs are legal (except
maybe portugal?)

You are absolutely right in everything you say. But legalizing crack cocaine
does not sound like an optimal solution to me, sure perhaps you'll succeed in
overthrowing the drug cartels. But then you have the issue of regulating or
even organizing the legal (private) distribution of drugs. I don't see that
ending well at all.

The prisons and the U.S.'s messed up legal system are the problem they are
what should be fixed.

~~~
betterunix
"then you have the issue of regulating or even organizing the legal (private)
distribution of drugs. I don't see that ending well at all."

We have been very successful at regulating tobacco and alcohol. Yes, you can
find moonshine if you look really hard, but that's just the point -- almost
nobody wants moonshine, people prefer regulated liquor. Sure there is black
market, unregulated tobacco and teenagers manage to buy it, but the vast
majority of people who smoke buy their tobacco legally.

For that matter we have also been overwhelmingly success at regulating
pharmaceutical drugs, to the point where a black market exists for them as
_replacements_ for illegal drugs. There is a reason recreational opiate users
want pills: the regulations on purity, dosage, etc. Even methamphetamine is
available by prescription (for narcolepsy, obesity, and ADHD treatment), and
the pharmaceutical stuff is a lot safer, _because of regulations_.

In reality we know how to regulate drugs, including extremely dangerous drugs
like alcohol and tobacco, and even "hard" drugs like methamphetamine.
Maintaining a regulatory system is not the problem here. The real problem is
that the war on drugs is profitable. One of the most ironic facts of lobbying
in today's world is that "The Partnership for a Drug-Free America" receives
money from alcohol, tobacco companies, and pharmaceutical companies. There is
also the matter of politicians having figured out that they can always portray
themselves as "tough on crime" by pushing for drug arrests. Police officers
unions are fighting for their members jobs by lobbying for maintaining or even
expanding the effort. The executive branch has also figured out that the war
on drugs is a great excuse for expanding executive power -- even to the point
of the attorney general's office having gained the authority to _declare_
drugs to be illegal (and then prosecute people for possessing those drugs).

Legalization and regulation are the answers our society really needs. We need
to disband the DEA, repeal the controlled substances act, pass a
constitutional amendment that forbids all such prohibitions, and set up a
regulatory framework. It is not likely to happen, for the reasons outlined
above and because we have had so many decades of propaganda that people have
trouble with the idea of alcohol being drug or of methamphetamine having
medicinal use.

Out of curiosity, what is it about crack cocaine that has you so terrified?
There are far more dangerous drugs out there...

~~~
tinco

        Out of curiosity, what is it about crack cocaine that has you so terrified? There are far more dangerous drugs out there...
    

Sorry for the late reply. I disagree with you, and I was a bit tired so I
stopped discussing :P I'll answer your question:

The combination of accessibility, addictiveness and health effects. I live
opposite to an addiction treatment center and see crack addicts every day.
It's addictive like tobacco is, has stronger mental health effects than
alcohol and because of its low cost is more accessible than any other hard
drug.

I know alcohol is very dangerous too, but 99% of alcohol users manage their
addiction in a way they can still manage their lives adequately. With crack
and other hard drug addictions you will find the odds reversed.

------
greenyoda
The article didn't address the question of _why_ AT&T has phone records going
back so many years. I doubt that five year old data about a customer would be
useful for marketing, considering that they have the most recent data. Nor is
old data useful for billing once the time period for contesting a phone bill
has elapsed. Network capacity planning could be done with anonymized or
aggregated data. So it would seem that the only reason why they hang on to all
this data is because the government asks them to, or because they can make
money selling it to the government (or both).

Now, think about what adverse effects such old data could have on justice. For
example, let's say a friend of mine from school, who I spent a lot of time
talking to on the phone a decade ago, decided this year to become a drug
dealer. The government could start investigating me based on this stale data,
despite not having any reasonable suspicion that I was involved in any crime.

I think that what we really need is a privacy-oriented phone company built on
the model of DuckDuckGo, which doesn't keep any data about customers beyond
what's necessary for billing purposes. But maybe the U.S. already has laws
that would make such an ethical phone company illegal.

~~~
bigiain
Theory #1 – Because deleting stuff at scale is harder than you think. If
you've got structured data (think "relational database, much of which is
pretty much guaranteed to be append-only") and you've optimised it's on-disk
structure for reporting (think "highly indexed, possibly even with both the
index data and the transaction data being stored in ways that take advantage
of known query patterns and physical disk geometry) – removing data from it is
likely to be _much_ more effort than just flipping a "deleted" flag and
continuing to expand your storage pool. This is even more true if you'd also
need to consider replicated copies/archives/snapshots/backups.
Facebook/Google/Twitter et al store _everything_ , not _just_ because they
think it'll make them more valuable to advertisers, but because deleting data
from distributed/sharded/backedup/archived databases is more expensive than
just marking it "deleted" and leaving it in place.

Theory #2 – The NSA (or it's predecessor or a related agency) have been paying
them to store whatever they can since whenever it became possible. If you're
prepared to ignore the privacy implications, it's obvious that some _tiny_
percentage of that data _will_ become useful for law enforcement purposes.
Unfortunately – when the "privacy implications" are considered in terms of "Is
_your_ privacy more important than _my_ career?" – it's pretty clear that a
very powerful cohort of law enforcement and intelligence agency decision
makers say "Hell no! I just need one or two more _big successes_ and I'll get
that promotion I want! Of _course_ it's worth monitoring every single person
on the planet to give me a shot at the executive bathroom and an office with a
door!" (or, less cynically but equal in consequence "Should I listen to every
phone conversation in America, if it might possibly mean we can stop the next
9-11? Yeah, I think it might be…").

~~~
dredmorbius
_Because deleting stuff at scale is harder than you think._

If you've got an age-based retention policy, _and_ you've built in the
capacity to delete the data, not really. Periodic purge. I'm not saying this
is _trivial_ , but it's not _hard_. The system was clearly designed _not_ to
delete the data.

Your theory #2 holds much more water.

~~~
bigiain
The optimist in me wants to argue that there may be OPEX vs CAPEX reasons to
have not invested in "building in the capacity to delete", or possibly even
tax implications of development budgets vs ongoing maintenance which might
reasonably explain why you'd choose to build such a system as "append-only,
archive indefinitely". The pessimist in me fears you're correct…

------
uptown
"The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around
the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration
agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far
back as 1987."

"Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the
locations of callers."

"Some four billion call records are added to the database every day"

No wonder phone number portability got pushed through.

~~~
nzealand
Even if you switch phone numbers, using Hemisphere they can determine your new
number. They look for a new phone number calling all your old contacts.

~~~
uptown
Absolutely. But allowing/encouraging people to keep a single identifier sure
makes things easier, and cuts down on your database joins.

~~~
superuser2
Do you _really_ think the DBA for a project that doesn't official exist gets
to write consumer protection policy?

Can you imagine any nontechnical organization doing something as complicated
as passing a law just to cut down on database joins? Seriously?

------
revelation
This "Protect the Program" stuff sounds like another "Parallel construction"
debacle. They are not talking about hiding the program from the public, they
are talking about getting the information elsewhere after you used Hemisphere.

Basically, this is a private backyard deal the DEA made with AT&T. Apparently
our laws have deteriorated to the point where AT&T lawyers believe they can do
this legally.

------
seiji
Another day, another peek behind the veil of large scale (institutional and
codified) data abuse.

We don't have to put up with them poking their fingers in our lives for much
longer. We can build around them. We can make them irrelevant. It'll take a
more concerted effort than building social networks for cats (where you spend
four years of your life posturing about "changing the world" and "being
successful" then the next day you cash out for big acquihire fake-success
bucks).

Stop studying $FAD_OF_THE_WEEK and go back to your math and ML fundamentals.
Play around with it. Build good things. Then build bigger good things. Build
good things for good people.

------
hawkharris
If you haven't already seen The House I Live In, I recommend watching the
documentary online. It will change the way you think about drugs and the
United States' prison system. The movie doesn't focus specifically on
technology, but it explores the by-any-means-necessary approach to law
enforcement that helps facilitate things such as the Hemisphere Project
mentioned in the story.

Trailer:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0atL1HSwi8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0atL1HSwi8)

~~~
D9u
I recently read an article about prisoners who had cell phones from which they
posted to their Facebook pages, replete with images of their drugs and snack
stashes, even facilitating communications between inmates in different
prisons.

It was only after investigative journalists brought the situation to the
attention of regulatory agencies that the prisons clamped down on the security
breaches within the prisons.

[http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/tennessee-inmates-
post...](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/tennessee-inmates-post-photos-
partying-drugs-cells-article-1.1334686)

~~~
vinceguidry
They didn't clamp down on anything. All they did was make an example of them.
I bet the other inmates 'helped'. They still have access to cell phones and
Facebook, they just are more careful now about this sort of stupidity.

------
ganeumann
_The government pays AT &T to place its employees in drug-fighting units
around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement
Administration agents and local detectives_

If the government pays your salary and you are embedded in the DEA, you are a
government employee. Saying these people work for AT&T is patently absurd.

~~~
Amadou
Exactly. People get so worked up about the technical distinctions, ones that
are mostly drawn by the IRS for tax purposes, that they confuse the form for
the function.

It is no different than Booz Hamilton "contractors" working on site at NSA and
other TLAs. If the money comes from the government and you take direction from
the government, even indirectly, you are an agent of the government.

------
rdl
It seems pretty clear that the mobile operators are the biggest commercial
organization threats to personal liberty. Their only real competition is the
banks.

~~~
jlund
Cash is really easy to use and is accepted everywhere. There's no similarly
elegant solution for mobile connectivity if you want to stop revealing
metadata information.

~~~
greenyoda
Well, not really everywhere. If you tried to buy an airline ticket with cash,
you'd be subject to a lot of scrutiny.

~~~
dredmorbius
"Legal tender for all debts, public and private".

~~~
Amadou
> "Legal tender for all debts, public and private".

Yes, _debts_ being the operative term here. You don't incur a debt until you
receive the product. Airline tickets are paid for in advance so the customer
never incurs a debt.

------
frank_boyd
This story alone is reason enough to _seriously_ start working on a program
and schedule for:

\- legalizing drugs and

\- selling them in a controlled environment,

\- taxed and

\- accompanied by a heavy investment in related education in schools
nationwide

...instead of throwing billions at killing our most basic rights.

The example of Portugal:
[http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-
drug-d...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-
decriminalization-in-portugal-12-years-later-a-891060.html)

~~~
mapt
We already have "related education" mandated as curricula in several different
grades in every school system in the country. It's not uncommonly ridiculous
propaganda, with blatant urban legends dramatized for your FUD, which is
widely rejected by the student body.

What we _need_ is a non-criminalized mental health system that actually
functions (addiction neural wiring being a subset of mental illnesses that can
be acquired through the victim's actions), and a poverty / diminished capacity
safety net that tries to redress problems in the way of marginalized people
rejoining civil society.

Essentially everything else would self-resolve after legalization.

------
mpyne
David Simon pointed out something like this when PRISM itself was first
leaked. The courts and law enforcement have combined for some pretty
incredible types of surveillance and investigation possibilities, and have
done so for years and years.

------
D9u
Is there any doubt as to the fascist nature of the USA now?

Call it "corporate cronyism," or "corporate fascism," but whatever it's
called, it's no land of the free anymore.

~~~
sanderjd
Well, unfortunately the word "fascist" isn't particularly meaningful anymore.
But there certainly isn't any doubt that Fourth Amendment protections for
documents in peoples' homes haven't been considered to be extended to digital
communications moving through various service providers' pipes, and that
various government agencies have been having a field day with surveillance
data they've been able to legally justify collecting based on that lack of
Constitutional protection. It seems largely like a widespread failure to
create language protecting digital privacy in the same _spirit_ as analog
privacy was originally protected. Maybe that's fascism, but it seems less
useful to use words without agreed upon meanings.

~~~
D9u
My bad for using sensational terminology, but the heart of the matter remains.

The privatization and collusion between government and private entities at the
expense of We the People has brought the USA to a point where it's obviously
become the land of the corporation and the home of the wage-slave.

Lobbyists with vast funding avail their corporate sponsors of representation
which is denied to those who lack such deep-pockets.

Only those with similar vast funding are able to attain high level elected
positions within our government, from whence they enact legislation which
furthers the divide between the plebiscite and the proletariat, which falls
right into line with Marxist "liberal-democratic" ideology, where the
government becomes the tool of the Bourgeoisie at the expense of the Proles
and the Plebes.

This socioeconomic stratification is quite visible in today's USA, and
programs such as "Hemisphere" exemplify this situation.

I too find the exclusion of electronic communications from 4th Amendment
protections to be an egregious failure of our Constitutional checks and
balances, yet due to my own limited understanding of the situation I have
always considered our electronic communications to be analogous to the "...
papers and effects..." outlined in the 4th Amendment, but my motivations are
different from those who have been appointed to interpret our legal
structures.

The very notion of "Too big to fail/jail" is yet another example of holding
those with vast resources to a different standard when compared to the average
Joe Public who worries about how he's going to continue to feed his family as
well as keep an acceptable roof over their head.

Where it leaves us is at an increasingly disadvantageous position, unless we
are of the Bourgeoisie and able to purchase our way through the system on par
with big banks who launder cartel drug profits with impunity; where political
appointees can perjure themselves before Congress with impunity; and where
every day words are redefined by our public servants as they maneuver their
way through the system with similar impunity as relates to their questionable
acts.

~~~
sanderjd
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I actually don't think the
recent surveillance scandals are the best example of corporatism. It is very
unclear that corporations (for instance AT&T, in the article) are actually
_colluding_ with the government, rather than being _legally compelled_ to
comply.

------
rl3
" _Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the
locations of callers._ "

Unlike the _publicly known_ N.S.A. data.

Also, as if call status matters.

------
leokun
It can't just be AT&T, it must be regional bells, the other major carriers,
small companies, everyone.

~~~
greenyoda
The article notes that:

 _" Representatives from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile all declined to comment
on Sunday in response to questions about whether their companies were aware of
Hemisphere or participated in that program or similar ones."_

If they were _not_ participating in Hemisphere or similar programs, I'd expect
them to be quick to say so.

~~~
otoburb
If they were asked to comment on Sunday (on a weekend), then it's probably
more likely that they wanted to confer with their legal departments before
denying with any confidence.

This is especially in light of the recent public/media PR confusion with
technology companies around PRISM.

------
tantalor
The connection to counternarcotics is a distraction from the real story here.
Legalizing drugs changes nothing. The article points this program was used in
routine law enforcement, e.g., bomb threats.

I'd like to know more about the "administrative subpoena" process. How often
are innocent people's phone logs dumped? Why not just install cameras in the
TVs and be done with it?

~~~
GabrielF00
If you look at slide 18, it looks like 96% of requests were for drug cases.

------
minor_nitwit
Yet another reason to legalize drugs.

------
Zigurd
When they say it goies back to at least 1987, I think they are referring to
the Daytona database of call detail records (CDRs). That project was active in
the 80's, but it goes back much farther, and it may contain most of the CDRs
ever created. In it's early stages, punched cards, and later magnetic tapes,
were trucked to Bell Labs and subsequently AT&T Labs, where the Daytona system
was operated. In it's heyday it was the biggest database on Earth.

There may be a successor to Daytona by now, and "all the CDRs, ever" is not as
impressive as it once was, but it is likely that joint telco/government
projects like Daytona have been collecting and analyzing call data since there
was call data to analyze.

I would not be surprised if they are still using Daytona's query language.

------
superuser2
HN and the internet community reacted with consistent and vigorous outrage
towards Facebook and Google for complying with subpoenas, and over unconfirmed
rumors and suspicions that they were selling user data to 3rd parties (not
just ad targeting internally). We had boycotts and alternatives to try to move
off these services.

Where's the boycott of the PSTN? Why aren't we angry at AT&T for actually
_embedding staff in the government_? Why aren't we encouraging people to
switch off their services?

~~~
Groxx
Probably because telcoms are already considered the worst offenders, and
assumed to be evil? No change to the status quo = no uproar.

------
ajb
"Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the
government as in the N.S.A. program"

The irony of this, is that it's exactly the tactic used by drug dealers. In
order to avoid the risk of possessing illegal substances, they coerce drug
addicts to hold their stash. The courts call this 'constructive possession'.

------
Bulkington
Key term: administrative subpoena. Judges, we don't need no stinkin' judges.

[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/administrative-
subp...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/administrative-subpoenas/)

For the P. Simon inclined, rather than just pointing to the obvious slope
we've slipped down since Nixon:

Whoah God only knows, God makes his plan The information's unavailable to the
mortal man We're workin' our jobs, collect our pay Believe we're gliding down
the highway, when in fact we're slip sliding away...

[http://www.lyricsfreak.com/s/simon+and+garfunkel/slip+slidin...](http://www.lyricsfreak.com/s/simon+and+garfunkel/slip+sliding+away_20124691.html)

------
coldcode
I wonder if this system has a search capability or it strictly limited to
phone # searches. I also wonder if tech to speech works well enough to convert
all these calls to text.

