SAN FRANCISCO — Federal prosecutors have a squeaky clean explanation for how the government acquired logs of some 750,000 calls in a criminal investigation. But defense lawyers are still suspicious that shadowy surveillance programs were used.
Joined by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, defense lawyers in a Northern District drug trafficking case urged U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte on Monday to compel the government to hand over evidence showing how they screened the defendants’ calls. In an amicus brief filed in October, the groups raised the possibility that the Hemisphere Project—a recently exposed surveillance program in which the government pays AT&T for access to a huge database of calls—had been used to gather evidence against the defendants.
