If you missed Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s by Scott Shane and Colin Moynihan when it first appeared in 2013, take a look at it now.
From the post:
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.
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The leaked presentation slides that inform this article claim some success stories but don’t offer an accounting for the effort expended and its successes.
Beyond the privacy implications, the potential for governmental overreaching, etc., there remains the question of how much benefit is being gained for the cost of the program.
Rather than an airy policy debate, numbers on expenditures and results could empower a far more pragmatic debate on this program.
I don’t doubt the success stories but random chance dictates that some drug dealers will be captured every year, whatever law enforcement methods are in place.
More data on phone data mining by the Drug Enforcement Administration could illustrate how effective or ineffective such mining is in the enforcement of drug laws. Given the widespread availability of drugs, I am anticipating a low score on that test.
Should that prove to be the case, it will be additional empirical evidence to challenge the same methods being used, ineffectively, in the prosecution of the “war” on terrorism.
Proving that such methods are ineffectual in addition to being violations of privacy rights could be what tips the balance in favor of ending all such surveillance techniques.