[Infowarrior] - Destroying the Right to Be Left Alone

[Richard Forno]

Published on Monday, September 23, 2013 by TomDispatch.com
Destroying the Right to Be Left Alone

The NSA Isn’t the Only Government Agency Exploiting Technology to Make Privacy Obsolete

by Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood

For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with “burner” phones (prepaid mobile phones easy to buy, use, and quickly dispose of), which are popular with drug dealers. The secret information gleaned from this relationship with the telecommunications giant has been used to convict Americans of various crimes, all without the defendants or the courts having any idea how the feds stumbled upon them in the first place. The program is so secret, so powerful, and so alarming that agents “are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” according to a recently released government PowerPoint slide.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/23-1