Home | Community | Message Board

Avalon Magic Plants
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: Bridgetown Botanicals Bridgetown Botanicals   MagicBag.co All-In-One Bags That Don't Suck   Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order   Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom   Original Sensible Seeds USA West Coast Strains   PhytoExtractum Buy Bali Kratom Powder   Mushroom-Hut Grow Bags   North Spore North Spore Mushroom Grow Kits & Cultivation Supplies

Jump to first unread post Pages: 1
OfflineYthanA
ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
Male User Gallery

Registered: 08/08/97
Posts: 18,793
Loc: NY/MA/VT Borderlands Flag
Last seen: 40 minutes, 53 seconds
Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s
    #18788376 - 09/02/13 05:39 AM (10 years, 5 months ago)

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s
nytimes.com

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 — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.

The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.

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.

The project comes to light at a time of vigorous public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance and on the relationship between government agencies and communications companies. It offers the most significant look to date at the use of such large-scale data for law enforcement, rather than for national security.

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, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.

The slides were given to The New York Times by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist in Port Hadlock, Wash. He said he had received the PowerPoint presentation, which is unclassified but marked “Law enforcement sensitive,” in response to a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies.

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.

“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.

The Obama administration acknowledged the extraordinary scale of the Hemisphere database and the unusual embedding of AT&T employees in government drug units in three states.

But they said the project, which has proved especially useful in finding criminals who discard cellphones frequently to thwart government tracking, employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.

Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations.”

Mr. Fallon said that “the records are maintained at all times by the phone company, not the government,” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone company so law enforcement can quickly keep up with drug dealers when they switch phone numbers to try to avoid detection.”

He said that the program was paid for by the D.E.A. and the White House drug policy office but that the cost was not immediately available.

Officials said four AT&T employees are now working in what is called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which brings together D.E.A. and local investigators — two in the program’s Atlanta office and one each in Houston and Los Angeles.

Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia, said he sympathized with the government’s argument that it needs such voluminous data to catch criminals in the era of disposable cellphones.

“Is this a massive change in the way the government operates? No,” said Mr. Richman, who worked as a federal drug prosecutor in Manhattan in the early 1990s. “Actually you could say that it’s a desperate effort by the government to catch up.”

But Mr. Richman said the program at least touched on an unresolved Fourth Amendment question: whether mere government possession of huge amounts of private data, rather than its actual use, may trespass on the amendment’s requirement that searches be “reasonable.” Even though the data resides with AT&T, the deep interest and involvement of the government in its storage may raise constitutional issues, he said.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the 27-slide PowerPoint presentation, evidently updated this year to train AT&T employees for the program, “certainly raises profound privacy concerns.”

“I’d 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,” he said.

Mr. Jaffer said that while the database remained in AT&T’s possession, “the integration of government agents into the process means there are serious Fourth Amendment concerns.”

Mr. Hendricks filed the public records requests while assisting other activists who have filed a federal lawsuit saying that a civilian intelligence analyst at an Army base near Tacoma infiltrated and spied on antiwar groups. (Federal officials confirmed that the slides are authentic.)

Mark A. Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, declined to answer more than a dozen detailed questions, including ones about what percentage of phone calls made in the United States were covered by Hemisphere, the size of the Hemisphere database, whether the AT&T employees working on Hemisphere had security clearances and whether the company has conducted any legal review of the program

“While we cannot comment on any particular matter, we, like all other companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law enforcement,” Mr. Siegel wrote in an e-mail.

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. A federal law enforcement official said that the Hemisphere Project was “singular” and that he knew of no comparable program involving other phone companies.

The PowerPoint slides outline several “success stories” highlighting the program’s achievements and showing that it is used in investigating a range of crimes, not just drug violations. The slides emphasize the program’s value in tracing suspects who use replacement phones, sometimes called “burner” phones, who switch phone numbers or who are otherwise difficult to locate or identify.

In March 2013, for instance, Hemisphere found the new phone number and location of a man who impersonated a general at a San Diego Navy base and then ran over a Navy intelligence agent. A month earlier the program helped catch a South Carolina woman who had made a series of bomb threats.

And in Seattle in 2011, the document says, Hemisphere tracked drug dealers who were rotating prepaid phones, leading to the seizure of 136 kilos of cocaine and $2.2 million.


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineCepheus
Balance
Male User Gallery


Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 04/19/06
Posts: 8,266
Loc: the space between reality...
Last seen: 1 year, 1 month
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: Ythan]
    #18788672 - 09/02/13 08:15 AM (10 years, 5 months ago)

Suddenly every tweaker in the country's paranoia is justified :lol:.


--------------------
"I only ever hope to reach equilibrium, in Nature's matrix, in line with the meridian" ~ Jehst

:sun: "...and I know that I have to keep breathing, as tomorrow the sun will rise, who knows what the tide will bring?" :sun:

Free Spore Ring Europe
Send any spare spore prints you might have and help the distribution :grin:

Open Source. Freedom.  GNU/Linux

Addicting is not a word.


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offlinehuffinglue
tryin to stay sober
Male

Registered: 09/26/08
Posts: 450
Loc: Texas
Last seen: 9 years, 6 months
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: Cepheus]
    #18788757 - 09/02/13 09:06 AM (10 years, 5 months ago)

Lmfao. I wonder what were gunna come up with to get around it. Like using torr browsers or whatever, but for phones. Or if everyones phone calls are gunna be all coded up like "the eagle is in the hen house" or some shit. God damn, that's a LOT of data to go through.


--------------------
I fucking hate grammer nazis! Yes, I can't spell. Yes, I don't have perfect grammer. I post from my phone and dont give a shit about people whose lifes are so boring they get off on putting people down for not having perfect fucking grammer, even though they know excactly what there saying.. Fuck You. It's just a ride mang...


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisible4HO-DMT
 User Gallery

Registered: 01/11/11
Posts: 5,073
Loc: County Line Road
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: Ythan]
    #18788825 - 09/02/13 09:23 AM (10 years, 5 months ago)

This is a good justification for never ever talking about drugs or other questionable activities over the phone.  I wonder how long before there are video cameras on every intersection in the fucking country.  Fuck the police.


Edited by 4HO-DMT (09/02/13 10:30 AM)


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offlinehuffinglue
tryin to stay sober
Male

Registered: 09/26/08
Posts: 450
Loc: Texas
Last seen: 9 years, 6 months
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: 4HO-DMT]
    #18789009 - 09/02/13 10:16 AM (10 years, 5 months ago)

Man, we almost got those redlight cameras taken down here in texas a few years ago, but seems like there still in full use.


--------------------
I fucking hate grammer nazis! Yes, I can't spell. Yes, I don't have perfect grammer. I post from my phone and dont give a shit about people whose lifes are so boring they get off on putting people down for not having perfect fucking grammer, even though they know excactly what there saying.. Fuck You. It's just a ride mang...


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleEastBayRay
 User Gallery
Registered: 06/06/13
Posts: 746
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: 4HO-DMT] * 1
    #18790086 - 09/02/13 02:04 PM (10 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

physicist said:
I wonder how long before there are video cameras on every intersection in the fucking country.  Fuck the police.


  There are already drones in the sky with facial recognition and other such technologies which can single out and identify people.  RFID "sniffers" are also in use (a number of credit cards and government issued identification cards have RFID built into them).  It's all going to come down to a single device that will be used for currency, monitoring, tracking, reading your mind, your archived and present internet history, who your friends and accomplices are, etc.  The beast is here. 

If you can get past the religious talk I suggest checking out the work of Katherine Albrecht.  Who knows, maybe she is onto something.  Either way, she is an expert on how the government and big business (pretty much one in the same) have devised and are continuing to develop new technologies for taking away everyone's privacy and freedoms and ways to implement their plans while keeping them under the radar.  The guise they tend to use is to sell something as a convenience or to protect you from danger yet hidden in all the legal mumbo jumbo is the real reason for their use of technology, and it isn't to benefit you, it's to enslave you.


Edited by EastBayRay (09/02/13 02:19 PM)


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblelessismore
Registered: 02/10/13
Posts: 6,268
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: huffinglue] * 1
    #18790112 - 09/02/13 02:10 PM (10 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

huffinglue said:
Lmfao. I wonder what were gunna come up with to get around it. Like using torr browsers or whatever, but for phones. Or if everyones phone calls are gunna be all coded up like "the eagle is in the hen house" or some shit. God damn, that's a LOT of data to go through.



Use skype with tor or proxy :-) (if you run linux just type "$ tsocks ./skype" , runs everything through tor)

Remember to sign up for skype via tor too, so skype doesn't have your real IP

if you must dial phone numbers, remember to pay with a stolen cc (you can trade ccs online for anything)
but skype->skype is free

remember to send all your DNS queries through tor as well
you need a iptables script for that, default is to query your ISPs dns server through your normal IP, and your isps dns server logs all sites you visit 5 years back

and the feds don't need a warrant to see what you do on the internet anymore
if they suspect you of terrorism, google/facebook has to turn out your info to them without warrant a judge ruled recently iirc
... and of course they suspect 10,000 a year iirc (everything is terrorism, hacking is electronic terrorism i.e. they call it lol)

never log into google/facebook , never use cookies
always use tor browser or surf from hacked wifi/library
always surf from a live cd if you are paranoid, no evidence
if you do anything from your normal PC, encrypt your homedir with strong encryption

my friend likes to hack for fun sometimes, via web browser (sqlinject)
all you need is a web browser, then you can spawn a shell on many servers

and last... remember to change your MAC ADDRESS
that's your machines unique identifier, and the ISP logs it indefinitely
00:de:ad:be:ef:00 ;-)

security is easier on linux... than on windows, you can do it all in one script easily


Edited by lessismore (09/02/13 02:49 PM)


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblelessismore
Registered: 02/10/13
Posts: 6,268
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: lessismore]
    #18790170 - 09/02/13 02:25 PM (10 years, 5 months ago)

Btw phone calls require almost no space

you can store 1 hour phone conversation down to 10MB or so, that's nothing today
most consumer harddisks are 1500GB (1500000MB)

phone conversations can be searched with text to speech (electronic speech recognition) or such, can't remember the name
technology has come far, requires almost zero resources, or disk space

they don't have to log your phone either at the ISP
most phones can be converted into remote listening devices

the manufacturer controls your phone, by adding firmware to it OTA (over the air)
the feds can just send you a new firmware that converts it into a listening device
even if you turn it of, it doesn't turn off, it pretends to do so, but keeps listening and transmitting to the feds

if you want security,  get rid of your phone ,creditcard, facebook,google, and surf from a livedist on hacked wifi (never same access point each time, never log into google/youtube/facebook)
or surf via tor + remember iptables each time (preferably via livedist...)


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineCamwritesgonzo
The Unflushable Stool
Male User Gallery


Registered: 06/09/12
Posts: 2,333
Loc: On Uranus Flag
Last seen: 6 months, 17 days
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: lessismore]
    #18791252 - 09/02/13 06:21 PM (10 years, 5 months ago)

Imagine the poor fucker that would have to go through and scan all that shit! Just think about all the gay sexting going on out there, and some straight-laced jesus bender agent having to sift through a million and a half photos of dudes' cocks.


--------------------
"I've always maintained that reality is for those who can't face drugs."-Tom Waits
"I feel the same way about disco as I feel about herpes."-Hunter S. Thompson
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
OfflineDurin


Registered: 01/06/13
Posts: 165
Last seen: 4 years, 11 months
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: Camwritesgonzo]
    #18791319 - 09/02/13 06:35 PM (10 years, 5 months ago)

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Big Brother is watching you.


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblelessismore
Registered: 02/10/13
Posts: 6,268
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: Durin]
    #18791803 - 09/02/13 08:12 PM (10 years, 5 months ago)

True, if you believe Bigbrother, what you just said is what you would believe in

Sadly a lot of people/most people believe bigbrother, probably because they watch tv all the time instead of making up their own minds from independent sources



Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offlineomegafaust
mycofarmer
Male User Gallery


Registered: 05/29/12
Posts: 1,227
Last seen: 7 years, 8 months
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: lessismore]
    #18796236 - 09/03/13 08:26 PM (10 years, 5 months ago)

How do they keep the records for five years but still have records from 26 years ago?


--------------------
The Universe has an interesting sense of irony, in that you are the universe experiencing itself.  All you are is a thought.


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offlinedokunai
Cactus, Cannabis, Cubensis

Registered: 01/31/10
Posts: 1,878
Loc: Hyphal Heights, USA
Last seen: 7 years, 1 month
Re: Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.'s [Re: omegafaust]
    #18796782 - 09/03/13 09:56 PM (10 years, 5 months ago)

I always encourage people to learn about information security and how to protect their privacy.  Admittedly it's a little easier for me to stay abreast of the latest because I deal with these types of issues for a living.  But still, to me not taking basic privacy and security precautions is like driving a car but refusing to learn jack shit about how it works or how to operate a car safely. 

Information systems in general are quite scary and antethical to maintaining privacy.  There are at the very bare minimum at least (and way more than in actuality) three groups of people you have to be worried about whose activities you will have no knowledge or very brief glimpses of. 

The government is probably the most scary, and they will use whatever methods they can to deprive you of privacy, freedom, and any assets they feel like seizing.  If you type "seizure" into google, the first definition is "the action of capturing someone or something using force."  That definition is ahead of epilepsy, which indicates the word is used more frequently to describe forcibly relieving someone of their assets than even the widespread medical condition. 

Of course, malware/spyware/virus writers are also another group who is up in your shit.  They will covertly install malware on your system to gain access to your financial information to exploit or sell to those who will exploit it.  They will capture your keystrokes and use your passwords, credit card numbers, banking logins, etc. for their own gain.

Finally, there are true hackers out there.  I'm not talking about script kiddies.  Those are people who use what someone else has discovered and made accessible to them to write malware or attack information systems.  I'm talking about the real people out there who make Microsoft, Google, and yes for the fanboiz, even Apple cringe.

What do these three groups I've highlighted have in common?  They all exploit new methods of invading your privacy.  These are frequently called "zero day" vulnerabilities because none of the "good guys" like antivirus companies are aware of their methods or how to mitigate them.

Malware writers have methods of compromising your computer that Symantec, AVG, Kaspersky, McAfee, etc. have no way to protect you against.  That is one "threat space," with which you have to be concerned.  For example, someone who figures out a new way to hack Windows and sells it to Russian virus writers can earn quite a payday.  These are probably the people you are most familiar with.  You get a virus and go "how the fuck did that happen?  I'm runnning three programs to stop this!"  The gov't also has their own methods, which are not published nor shared with antivirus companies.  And finally, the true hackers(some of which work for NSA, etc.) are probably the hardest to defend against.  You can significantly harden your information security posture, beyond what most people do, and if you are a high value target, they WILL find a way to get what they want.  That's because all computer code contains erros (a tautology of sorts), and they have the extreme skill level required to find and use them.

There's absolutely no way you have any expectation of privacy when using any computer, despite the fact that it's a very disturbing realization.  Yes,  your privacy SHOULD be respected in an ideal world, but in reality it never will be.  Not as long as anyone out there can make a single cent by depriving you of privacy.


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: 1

Shop: Bridgetown Botanicals Bridgetown Botanicals   MagicBag.co All-In-One Bags That Don't Suck   Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order   Kraken Kratom Red Vein Kratom   Original Sensible Seeds USA West Coast Strains   PhytoExtractum Buy Bali Kratom Powder   Mushroom-Hut Grow Bags   North Spore North Spore Mushroom Grow Kits & Cultivation Supplies


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* Teenager dies after being mistakenly shot by US drug agents TinMan 3,854 10 03/30/03 09:51 PM
by cheesenoonions
* DEA agent dies in plane crash, and more ZippoZM 3,190 10 06/04/04 08:30 AM
by KingOftheThing
* Drug War Addiction motamanM 2,994 1 05/12/03 11:03 AM
by Anonymous
* DEA Agent Shoots Self During Gun Safety Class luvdemshrooms 2,645 11 05/03/04 02:57 PM
by Randolph_Carter
* Parents Warned About Legal Hallucinogenic Drug motamanM 2,541 2 02/26/04 10:48 PM
by llamaboy
* Youths risk death in latest drug abuse trend motamanM 11,225 18 01/27/17 09:32 AM
by Themanwiththeplan
* Machine aims to replace drug dogs motamanM 2,685 4 11/22/03 02:16 PM
by DailyPot
* US Developing drug weapons Ellis Dee 2,419 1 03/24/03 02:39 PM
by motaman

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: motaman, veggie, Alan Rockefeller, Mostly_Harmless
2,906 topic views. 0 members, 7 guests and 5 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.024 seconds spending 0.006 seconds on 12 queries.