On Nov. 11, 2013, Victorville, California, sheriff’s deputies and a coroner responded to a motorcyclist’s report of human remains outside of town.
They identified the partially
bleached skull of a child, and later discovered the remains of the
McStay family who had been missing for the past three years. Joseph, 40,
his wife Summer, 43, Gianni, 4, and Joseph Jr., 3, had been bludgeoned
to death and buried in shallow graves in the desert.
Investigators
long suspected Charles Merritt in the family’s disappearance,
interviewing him days after they went missing. Merritt was McStay’s
business partner and the last person known to see him alive. Merritt had
also borrowed $30,000 from McStay to cover a gambling debt, a mutual
business partner told police. None of it was enough to make an arrest.
Even
after the gravesite was discovered and McStay’s DNA was found inside
Merritt’s vehicle, police were far from pinning the quadruple homicide
on him.
Until they turned to Project Hemisphere.
Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T
that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to
determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and
potentially why.
“Merritt was in a position to
access the cellular telephone tower northeast of the McStay family
gravesite on February 6th, 2010, two days after the family disappeared,”
an affidavit for his girlfriend’s call records reports Hemisphere
finding (PDF).
Merritt was arrested almost a year to the date after the McStay
family’s remains were discovered, and is awaiting trial for the murders.
In 2013, Hemisphere was revealed by The New York Times and described only within a Powerpoint presentation made by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Times
described it as a “partnership” between AT&T and the U.S.
government; the Justice Department said it was an essential, and
prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool.
However, AT&T’s own
documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows
Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything
from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud.
Hemisphere
isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed,
marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to
taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive
trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law
enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it
becomes public.
These new revelations come as the company seeks to acquire Time Warner in the face of vocal opposition saying the deal would be bad for consumers.
Donald Trump told supporters over the weekend he would kill the
acquisition if he’s elected president; Hillary Clinton has urged
regulators to scrutinize the deal.
While telecommunications companies
are legally obligated to hand over records, AT&T appears to have
gone much further to make the enterprise profitable, according to ACLU
technology policy analyst Christopher Soghoian.
“Companies
have to give this data to law enforcement upon request, if they have
it. AT&T doesn’t have to data-mine its database to help police come
up with new numbers to investigate,” Soghoian said.
AT&T
has a unique power to extract information from its metadata because it
retains so much of it. The company owns more than three-quarters of U.S.
landline switches, and the second largest share of the nation’s
wireless infrastructure and cellphone towers, behind Verizon. AT&T
retains its cell tower data going back to July 2008, longer than other
providers. Verizon holds records for a year and Sprint for 18 months,
according to a 2011 retention schedule obtained by The Daily Beast. Read More
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