The secretive phone tracking done as part of...
The secretive phone tracking done as part of Hemisphere Project needs to be scrutinized in the broader context of government phone surveillance, said the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation in a Tuesday amicus brief filed in U.S.…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
v. Diaz-Rivera in U.S. District Court in San Francisco (http://bit.ly/19QDCyl). The privacy advocates sought to “provide important context and to underscore the larger implications” in the case on what they call “highly intrusive and unconstitutional” call records tracking and sharing among government agencies, they said. The brief describes the broader bulk collections of data the National Security Agency engages in and the push for more transparency in that regard as well as in how the NSA shares this information with other agencies. It slams the Hemisphere Project, which was revealed in September by The New York Times and showcased how the government has tapped phone data for drug investigations (CD Sept 5 p16). “At minimum, Hemisphere raises similar constitutional concerns as the NSA mass call-tracking database,” the brief said. “This violates the Fourth and First Amendments.” There’s a hearing in the case at 9 a.m. Nov. 5. In the criminal prosecution for drug activities of the case, “the original indictment named 20 defendants,” said ACLU staff attorney Linda Lye in a blog post (http://bit.ly/GRqTAK). “The investigation relied heavily on cell phone surveillance. The government disclosed to defendants that it acquired records for almost 750,000 phone calls from 643 unique numbers. But the government has not explained how it acquired all of this cell phone data."