AT&T Maintains Call Database For the DEA Going Back To 1987 141
Jah-Wren Ryel writes "Forget the NSA — the DEA has been working hand-in-hand with AT&T on a database of records of every call that passes through AT&T's phone switches going back as far as 1987. The government pays AT&T for contractors who sit side-by-side with DEA agents and do phone records searches for them. From the article: 'For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counter narcotics 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.'"
NYPD cannibal cop! (Score:4, Interesting)
While i don't believe in the 'if you are innocent you have nothing to hide' concept, most people really don't care of the government knows that the wife told them to grab some milk on the way home.
But I do care about the NYPD cannibal cop [usatoday.com] that abused a restricted law-enforcement database so that he could find women to consume. Do you really think he's the only one abusing the system?
Re:WTF??? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a difference between just giving every call ever to the government for the fun of it, and having an agent show up with papers in order, asking for the calls to/from a certain number and getting only that.
The NSA has a warrant for everything they do to. The problem is not the warrants, the problem is the existence of the database. It is begging for abuse, perhaps by the government, perhaps by AT&T, perhaps by criminals that have infiltrated either.
The cali cartel set up their own version of this database [cocaine.org] in Colombia and used it to sniff out any of their people who were talking to law enforcement.
Re:WTF??? (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the early-mid 1990s, I worked on a billing data collection system that was to be sold to the Australian and German telcos.
The EBAF and SMDR data collected from the phone switches only includes the to/from phone numbers, the start time of the call, and the end time of the call. it's sufficient to do billing calculations, but absolutely does not include recordings of the calls themselves.
Back then, of course, online storage was very expensive and computers were only in the 386 power range, so once billing was completed, the data was archived off to tape in case there were any billing discrepencies that had to be investigated in the future. It would seem those tapes were retained and loaded into the online systems that are feasible nowadays.
Still, I am surprised that they bothered doing so -- it's not like they'd be willing to correct billing that far back. So it had to be done in response to law enforcement demands rather than because of any valid business need.