I realized something was terribly wrong when The Herald's electronic press fell *out of sync* with the soothing retro-euro-disco thump of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories playing in the editorial offices.

Normally the technical staff are careful to avoid harshing the mellow of the writers, but now the clatter of the press was fighting a winning battle against the sound of a Moog module synced to the click track in "Giorgio by Moroder". I didn't even want to think about what might happen by the time "Get Lucky" rolled around.

A familiar voice could be heard yelling "THIS SHIT WILL NOT STAND!" from the machine room as a mob of enraged engineers chanted

WTF? NSA?
WTF!! NSA!!
GIMPED ELLIPTIC CURVE CYPTO?
NO FUCKING WAY!!!

The chaotic cacophony of enraged engineers completely overwhelmed Daft Punk when the door opened and the mob spilled into the offices brandishing cross-compilers, git repos, malformed packets, Macbook Pros, and carpal tunnel wrist braces - the tools of their trade.

I put down the copy of Vanity Fair I had been reading. A tall black-clad figure marched across the newsroom and slammed an iPad on my desk, nearly upsetting my glass of coconut water. "Did you see this shit, Pix?"

Smiling sweetly, I asked, "Is there something wrong, Mark?", then glanced at the iPad and frowned. Mark McCahill - one the the Herald's technical staff - had been reading The Guardian again.

I was eventually able to shoo the other engineers back to work with the promise that I would talk to McCahill and see if there might be a coherent story for Herald readers - but I had my doubts.

We'd been through this scene before. Over the summer, as whistleblower Edward Snowden's leaks corroded what little remaining credibility the Obama regime might have, the engineers grew increasingly angry. Strangely enough, most engineers want to build systems that benefit society, believe in the rule of law, and even take constitutional privacy protections seriously. Who knew?

The best approach calm the situation seemed to be an interview, so I invited the ponytailed binary boy to have a seat.

Pixeleen Mistral: So what is it this time?
Mark McCahill: The NSA and GCHQ have been intentionally gimping the crypto standards for the Internet, strong arming IT vendors into releasing products with security-defeating backdoors, and running man-in-the middle attacks. This sort of thing destroys the foundations of trust and commerce on the Internet. It is so bad that Bruce Schneier - one of the gods of cryptography - sent out the bat signal last week. Bruce is calling for the November IETF internet standards meeting to hold an emergency session to figure out how to fix what the NSA has broken. It's time to take the Internet back.

Pixeleen Mistral: Well everybody knows that the NSA spies.
Mark McCahill: Sure, but we now know unethical engineers and out of control government agencies have been doing what we had suspected - intentionally weakening the security systems the internet uses. And they did this so they can spy on everyone, everywhere via the sort of dragnet surveillance that requires building enormous data centers at great expense. The only people that benefit from this are power freaks in the government, their contractors, and corrupt politicians that approve NSA overreach and are rewarded with campaign contributions from the contractors. This is the sort of positive feedback loop of corruption that Lawrence Lessig has been warning about for years.

Pixeleen Mistral: Why do you think they are doing that?
Mark McCahill: Arrogance combined with stupidity. The NSA assumed that nobody would find the backdoors they introduced - a very dangerous assumption given how poorly they protect their secrets. I'd like to see the risk analysis the NSA did when they started down this path - if they even bothered. Based on what I have read about NSA leader 'Cowboy' Keith Alexander, cost/benefit analysis is just not how he rolls. I can't even begin to guess what this will cost the USA's I.T. industry in lost sales. So chalk it up to delusional leadership. Take a look at Tom Englehardt's "And Then There Was One" piece - it explains a lot about the political dementia of the USA.

Pixeleen Mistral: Ok I can see the arrogance part, but where is the stupidity?
Mark McCahill: The NSA doesn't even know exactly which documents Snowden took, which is obvious because each time the NSA denies something, the denial is shown to be a lie by the next leak. Seems like the NSA have weak internal security, doesn't it? Aren't they supposed to be good at this sort of thing?

The head of the NSA - General Keith Alexander - says he is going to use automation to get rid of 90% of the 1000 system administrators the NSA has to prevent another Edward Snowden-style leak. If they can really automate systems that much, why haven't they done so already? Was cowboy Keith worried about upsetting the gravy train for NSA contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton? Sounds to me like the NSA has way too much money to throw around. This looks like a bad case of outsourcing and consultants run wild.

Pixeleen Mistral: How so?
Mark McCahill: A classic failure mode for I.T. projects occurs when you bring in "visionary" consultants who then expand the scope of the project to build a bigger empire and run up more billable hours.

Foreign Policy has a great story about how Alexander rose to power and built his empire. Foreign Policy says Alexander hired a Hollywood set designer to make his Fort Belvoir "Information Dominance Center" look like the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek to impress members of congress when they came through on tours. Sound familiar?

Pixeleen Mistral: Sounds like those Justice League Unlimited guys who were spying their way through Second Life a few years ago. I've got a picture here somewhere...

Would Keith Alexander would approve of the JLU command center? yes.

Mark McCahill: They wanted to connect the dots too, didn't they? That Foreign Policy article has a great passage that raises questions about how effective Alexander's dragnet surveillance fetish really is in 'fighting terrorism':

When he ran INSCOM and was horning in on the NSA's turf, Alexander was fond of building charts that showed how a suspected terrorist was connected to a much broader network of people via his communications or the contacts in his phone or email account.

"He had all these diagrams showing how this guy was connected to that guy and to that guy," says a former NSA official who heard Alexander give briefings on the floor of the Information Dominance Center. "Some of my colleagues and I were skeptical. Later, we had a chance to review the information. It turns out that all [that] those guys were connected to were pizza shops."

…

A retired military officer who worked with Alexander also describes a "massive network chart" that was purportedly about al Qaeda and its connections in Afghanistan. Upon closer examination, the retired officer says, "We found there was no data behind the links. No verifiable sources. We later found out that a quarter of the guys named on the chart had already been killed in Afghanistan."

Pixeleen Mistral: i c
Mark McCahill: Are Keith Alexander and his boss James Clapper competent at anything other than empire building? You really should read that Foreign Policy profile of Alexander. Check out the money quotes about Alexander and Heath - his semi-tame techie sidekick:

"Heath was at Alexander's side for the expansion of Internet surveillance under the PRISM program. Colleagues say it fell largely to him to design technologies that tried to make sense of all the new information the NSA was gobbling up. But Heath had developed a reputation for building expensive systems that never really work as promised and then leaving them half-baked in order to follow Alexander on to some new mission.

"He moved fairly fast and loose with money and spent a lot of it," the retired officer says. "He doubled the size of the Information Dominance Center and then built another facility right next door to it. They didn't need it. It's just what Heath and Alexander wanted to do." The Information Operations Center, as it was called, was underused and spent too much money, says the retired officer. "It's a center in search of a customer."

...

"There's two ways of looking at these guys," the retired military officer says. "Two visionaries who took risks and pushed the intelligence community forward. Or as two guys who blew a monumental amount of money."

Pixeleen Mistral: So what is next?
Mark McCahill: Well, the NSA will have a hard time offering any advice to standards committees - who would trust them now? A lot of effort will go into re-doing the security and privacy underpinnings of the Internet, now that we know the spy agencies are completely out of control. 

In terms of technical strategy, since the NSA is treating the public as an adversary, look for serious work on privacy and anonymity-preserving standards designed for anyone to use. I'd love to see robust IPSec and TOR built into everyone's home WIFI router.

Pixeleen Mistral: what do you say to readers who are skeptical that the NSA and spy communities are a problem?
Mark McCahill: The best response is something Glenn Greenwald said a while ago. Google 'the Church committee, FBI, and Martin Luther King" and tell me what you find. 

Pixeleen Mistral: what have I missed? Is there anything else you want to share with the Herald readers?
Mark McCahill: It's been real Pix, and now I see what Urizenus meant about being 'self-identical'.

Pixeleen Mistral: I know what you mean - now can you get back to the machine room and get that press back in sync? Get Lucky is going to start playing any minute, and I have stories to write.
 

In a recent article here in the Herald, Urizenus Sklar argued that the US Attorney in the Barrett Brown case was attempting to smear Barrett by listing a whole number of allegedly bad attributes of Barrett and then publishing them in a public court document.  

I think Uri missed the bigger picture here. Not that Uri is wrong.  But Uri missed the fact that larded into the US Attorney's comments is a tacit indictment of the entire US criminal justice system.  

The US Attorney's screed against Barrett looked like this:

Perhaps without realizing the prejudicial effects on brown the media repeatedly has publicized potentially inadmissible and prejudicial information such as Brown’s … anarchist ideology… troubled childhood and alternative schooling, declaration that he is an atheist, use and abuse of ecstasy, acid, heroin, and marijuana, lack of steady employment, claimed diagnoses of ADHD and depression, associates descriptions of Brown as a junkie, name fag, moral fag, court jester…

Now, the question is this:  Why on God's Green Earth should it be impossible, or even difficult, for someone who is an atheist, or someone who is depressed, or someone who has ADHD or someone who lacks steady employment, or someone who has used drugs to get a fair trial in this country?

You see the deep point here is that implicit in the US Attorney's statement is the admission that for people who are even just a tiny bit outside of the mainstream, the justice system can not be counted on to be fair to them.  Any perceived flaw which sets you outside of a Norman Rockwell ideal is enough to ensure that the justice system, if you find your way into it, will grind you to pieces.  Tiny pieces.

If you are depressed, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you use marijuana, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you had alternative schooling or raised by alternative parenting, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you are a student of, or influenced by, anarchist writings, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you were once a heroine addict, now on Suboxone, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you had a troubled childhood, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you lack steady employment, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

If you are a moral fag (that is, if you are ethically motivated hacker), you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you.

In short, if you are remotely alternative and outside of the power structure, you cannot count on the justice system to be fair to you. 

That you US Attorney, for admitting this.  Now, when do we begin to fix the problem?

Yes, summer is winding down, but it isn't too late to cram in some late late summer reading.  And who better to suggest good solid reading, but the FBI.  Dell Cameron, writing in the Daily Dot, has the goods.  He gives us the 20 online publications concerning Barrett Brown that the prosecution considers "must read."  Or is that "don't read".  Hmm these lists are so confusing...

Here is how Mr. Cameron lays it down.

I attended the gag order hearing on September 4 and listened as the U.S. government spoke candidly about the journalists who've covered Barrett's case. Twenty articles were admitted into evidence from various writers and websites. Much to my surprise, the U.S. government has great taste in journalism. I've collected the online articles it selected as evidence against Barrett Brown for your reading pleasure.

You want to know who made the list, don't you?  Well to see it you just gotta click through! [link]

Spoiler though, some of the names will be familiar to Herald readers!

It seems like just today that I published a long article explaining the strange case of Barrett Brown and how a beloved Second Life alumnus was looking at 105 years in prison for sharing a link to an online document dump. Come to think of it, it *was* today! And this afternoon, I received the news that a gag order has been issued for Barrett Brown and his defense team. A gag order? Let’s reflect on that.

The prosecution, to make the case for a gag order, offered up a number of articles that had been published in places like the New York Times, The Nation, The Huffington Post, etc – seven by that mild mannered tweed wearing lovable professor Ludlow! The view of the prosecution was that given all the people in Texas that read The Nation and the annual NYT articles on Barrett Brown it just would not be possible to find a neutral jury pool. Because you know, all people in Texas do is read The Nation.

Let’s put this in even more perspective. This is the judicial system that convinced itself that there was not too much publicity for OJ, or for Jodi Arias, or for really any trial that shows up on Nancy Grace. But OMG someone publishes a story in The Nation and the scales of justice are out of balance. You just can’t find a neutral jury anymore.

Allow me to opine:  Barrett Brown was exercising his constitutional right to *defend* himself against charges for which he has not been convicted. And, by the way, these are charges which he believes, as do I, that are not just false, but absurdly false. Ditto for the lawyers. If they can’t defend their client in public against false charges then the public will be ignorant of the specifics of the trial and will not be able to judge whether justice is being served or whether it is being miscarried. Of course that is probably the point – if justice was being served there would be no point in a gag order; there would be no reason to fear open discussion of the specifics of the case.

And so, as the Herald yacht powers its way towards Long Island New York, I stare at the now dormant Barrett Brown hotline wondering: Is this how the American system of justice finally collapses into a system for oppression and tyranny? Not with a bang or even a whimper, but just a dial tone?

Last week I was on the Herald Yacht, steaming towards the Herald retirement villa in the Turks and Caicos islands, when the emergency phone rang in the ready room. Helmut, my trusty cabin boy summoned me. Barrett Brown was calling.

Mr. Brown, for those of you who don’t know, is currently in federal custody looking at charges that could put him away for 105 years for linking to the cache from a hack of the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting. He was also an alumnus of the notorious Second Life griefer group The Patriotic Nigras and a second group called illuminati/i/illuminati. “Uri baby,” he implored, “you have to come out of retirement, the fate of the free world hangs in the balance!”

For those of you who don’t know it, the story of Barrett Brown is an interesting one. After his years as a Second Life griefer, Barrett graduated to being a rather gifted writer, penning many essays for Vanity Fair, The Skeptical Inquirer, True/Slant, The Guardian, and the Huffington Post. True to his roots, he mercilessly trolled conservative pundits like Thomas Friedman, Michelle Malkin, Charles Krauthammer, and Sara Palin biographer Robert Stacy McCain.

In 2010 Brown was working on a book on right wing political pundits, when some of the actions of Anonymous caught his attention and he penned a defense in support of one of their anti-censorship operations in Australia. This brought him to the attention of Gregg Housh (the Anon who bought a Guy Fawkes mask and, with a crack team of fellow Anons, made the first video for Operation Chanology) and Housh subsequently brought Brown into the orbit of Anonymous. Brown eventually became a frequent spokesperson for Anonymous during the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. (Brown’s role did not involving computer hacking – he couldn’t hack his way out of a box of tissues.) His interview with Michael Issikoff in those heady days remains legendary. 

In February, 2011, against the background of the Anonymous actions in the Arab Spring, Aaron Barr, the CEO of a private information security company called HBGary boasted that he had identified leadership of Anonymous. This boast provoked an epic hack of HBGary by a hacktivist group called Intenet Feds (subsequently called LulzSec). That hack, which was splashy enough to garner the attention of The Colbert Report, resulted in every form of pwnage known to mankind, including the defacing and destruction of the servers and websites of HBGary. Along the way 70,000 e-mails were downloaded and posted online. One terabyte of data from HBGary’s backup servers were wiped, and as a final insult to injury the contents of its CEO Aaron Barr’s iPad were remotely wiped.

The HBGary hack was motivated by the desire to humiliate HBGary, but it had the side effect of dropping a gold mine into the lap of Mr. Brown. One of the first things discovered was a power point presentation that developed a strategy for undermining the credibility of the journalist Glenn Greenwald and thereby neutralize his defense of WikiLeaks. But there was more. There was a conspiracy of government agencies, lobbying and cybersecurity firms to carry out a disinformation campaign against critics of the Chamber of Commerce. There were also plans for data mining and disinformation campaigns targeting social organizations and advocacy groups.

The plot was already thick, but then it thickened more. By June, the FBI had the goods on the leader of LulzSec, one Hector Xavier Monsegur, who was known to his associates in LulzSec as Sabu. The FBI arrested Sabu on June 7, 2011 and (according to court documents) turned him into an informant the following day. Six months later (Dec. 24, 2011) under the control of the FBI and possibly the FBI’s direction, Sabu appears to have directed some of his LulzSec crew (now called AntiSec) to hack the website of a private security company known as Strategic Forecasting, yielding a trove of approximately five million emails. The FBI may have controlled Sabu and hence the Stratfor hack, but they lost control of the five million emails in the Stratfor database, which quickly made their way onto the Internet and then to WikiLeaks.

When the contents of the Stratfor leak became available, Barrett Brown (who again played no role in the hacking and had no relation to LulzSec or Sabu) determined that his ProjectPM should have a look at it. To direct the project participants to the Stratfor data dump, he pasted a URL into a chat channel. This ultimately would be the principle “crime” for which he is facing 105 years in jail.

It is worth noting that the contents of the Stratfor hack were even more outrageous than those of the HBGary hack. This time the emails ranged from proposals for renditions to surveillance on the Yes Men on behalf of Dow Chemical. One remarkable exchange revealed that the Coca-Cola company was asking Stratfor for intelligence on dealing with PETA, and the Stratfor Vice President for Intelligence remarked in a leaked email that “The FBI has a classified investigation on PETA operatives. I'll see what I can uncover.” Suggesting, of course, that not only did Stratfor have access to the classified material, but that it would be provided to Coca-Cola. The FBI had been turned into a private dick for corporate America.

The FBI, arguably itself responsible for the information being released, needed to get the toothpaste back into the tube, decided that one way to staunch the distribution of the Stratfor data would be to stomp on Brown and his Project PM. A warrant was issued for Brown’s laptop, presumably on the assumption that incriminating information would be found there.

When the FBI went to serve the warrant on Brown he was not home but at his mother’s house, and he sensibly decided to stay there. The FBI returned with a warrant to search his mother’s house, retrieved his laptop, and found exactly nothing incriminating. Deciding they needed a way to turn up the heat on Brown, they initiated charges against his mother for obstruction of justice.

At the time Brown was experiencing the difficult side effects of the medication he was taking to ameliorate the effects of his heroin addiction while also dealing with the harassment of his mother by the FBI, and he snapped, uploading a video to YouTube that vaguely threatened the FBI agent that was harassing his mother.

“I know what’s legal, I know what’s been done to me… And if it’s legal when it’s done to me, it’s going to be legal when it’s done to FBI Agent Robert Smith—who is a criminal.”
“That’s why [FBI special agent] Robert Smith’s life is over. And when I say his life is over, I’m not saying I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids… How do you like them apples?”

Because threatening an agent would only put Barrett away for a few years, the charges that could lock him up permanently had to be found elsewhere. In this instance, the DoJ took advantage of the fact that the Stratfor data had a number of unencrypted credit card numbers and validation codes. This would be the pretext for charging Brown with Traffic in Stolen Authentication Features, Access Device Fraud, Aggravated Identity Theft. Add to this an Obstruction of Justice charge and the charges relating to the threat against the FBI agent, and Brown is looking century of jail time. He has been denied bail.

When Brown went to jail, work on ProjectPM ground to a halt. Even worse, the DoJ now took an interest in everyone else who had participated in ProjectPM. On April 2, the DOJ served the domain hosting service CloudFlare with a subpoena for all records on the ProjectPM website, and in particular asked for the IP addresses of everyone who had accessed and contributed to ProjectPM, claiming it was a criminal enterprise. The message was clear: Anyone else who looks into this matter does so at their grave peril.

Here we are. Barrett Brown sits in prison and many activists are afraid to go near the Stratfor files; worse, the mainstream media appears to be completely uninterested in their contents.

While the media and much of the world have been understandably outraged by the revelation of the NSA’s spying program, Barrett Brown’s work was pointing towards much deeper problems. First, he showed that this wasn’t merely a problem of private intelligence firms spying on us – it was worse than that. These firms are trying to manufacture a false reality for us. They are engaged in PSYOPS against a civilian population on behalf of their corporate clients.

But even this tells only half the story. One might have thought that private intelligence agencies were simply doing outsourced intelligence work for the US Government. But unfortunately it seems that the tail has begun to wag the dog – it appears that in many respects the US Government and in particular the Department of Justice is now working for private intelligence firms. This is evident when, for example, Stratfor asks for FBI classified files on PETA or the Department of Justice is used to try and punish journalists for probing into these private intelligence companies.

But I disgress. I began with Barrett’s call to the Herald hotline. So what did Barrett want? He put it this way: “Uri baby, in the hall of mirrors that is the Internets, you can only trust the Herald to get the story right. You and Pix have got to come back. The game is bigger now.”

And well, yes, the game is bigger now. Former Herald staffer Prokofy Neva saw this too, in her delightfully positive and chirpy essay on her blog Wired State. 

The entire thing makes me think of The Wrong Hands and the Justice League -- a story in Second Life that prefigured many of our woes in real life today…

… It's like the story of WikiLeaks and the story of the NSA, today. It is one of the many thing I feel were prototyped in Second Life where it was really easy to prototype -- a hostage community of people online that you could easily affect like dropping a rock in a pond, endless capacity for virtual harassment, endless edge-casing and lawfaring capacity with a troop of coders and developers of the same hacker tribe who are the managers of Second Life at Linden Lab.

Actually, I don’t know what that means and neither do you, but what I think Prok is trying to say is that reality is beginning to imitate the virtual reality of 2006, and those of us who honed our skills trying to sort through the spy-vs-spy mindfuck games of Second Life are particularly well equipped to navigate house of mirrors created for us by the NSA, FBI, private intelligence companies etc.

So now that the so-called Real World has begun to imitate Second Life, the Herald is returning to its mission of helping its dedicated readers find their way through the house of mirrors. There is a war on reality happening. The Herald is going to cover it. For Barrett Brown. For our readers. And for the lulz.
 

After reading the New York Times' revelation that the US government pays AT&T employees to sit with DEA and local law enforcement agents and query a phone record database "that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls" and and adds four billion call records to the database every day, I began wondering what all this costs.

Based on public records, it appears that AT&T has been paid approximately $900,000/year by the Harris County, Texas Sheriff's Department over each of the last 5 years under a sole source agreement for services associated with "Operation Hemisphere". AP reports that the "federal government pays the salaries of four AT&T employees", but only one of these employees is in Texas, so the total cost of Operation Hemisphere remains unclear. Is AT&T also charging $900,000/year for each of the other 3 employees? In any case, there seems to be plenty of room for profit.

One of the Hemisphere training slides published by the NYT shows a total of 2770 requests for 2012. 

How confident can one be that AT&T is billing $900,000/year in Texas?

Experienced Internet Detectives agree - reading through the comments on most web sites risks permanently lowering your opinion of the collective intelligence of the public, but this risk is offset by an occasional surprisingly insightful gem. So I was delighted to come across a comment that points out Harris County budget public hearing notifications mention Operation Hemisphere -- and costs.

Didn't Harris County get the memo?

Spending a few minutes with a google search tailored to look through the http://www.co.harris.tx.us site for mention of Operation Hemisphere uncovered a wealth of public meeting notices with budget statements running back to 2008 -- and a neatly symmetric pattern of grants to the Sheriff's Department and matching sole source payments for professional services to AT&T.

While the NYT claims the formerly secret program reaches back 26 years, it appears AT&T is in a position to supply uniquely valuable information dating back decades, put the NSA's collect-it-all ambitions to shame, and profit handsomely while doing so. 

Unfortunately, this may also damage AT&T's reputation as pointed questions about 4th Amendment rights are raised, and an arrangement where records are released via administrative subpoena rather than via a judicial warrant could lead some to conclude that this is another example of unconstitutional government overreach. Certainly Tyler Durden over at ZeroHedge is not alone in concluding "America is now officially an authoritarian state, in which personal privacy no longer exists in any capacity, in which the public-private complex collaborates against its citizens without express prior public knowledge or permission".

Harris County details grants and sole source professional service payments

date	type	dollars	description
01/22/08	sole source services	$944,321	AT&T for purchase of service associated with Operation Hemisphere for the Sheriff’s Department for the period ending July 31, 2008 at an approximate cost of $944,321.
10/07/08	grant	$950,000	Accept additional 2008 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Grant funds from the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the amount of $950,000 to support the Houston Intelligence Support Center’s Operation Hemisphere to interdict illegal drug trafficking.
03/10/09	sole source services	$910,705	AT&T for intelligence services provided to the Intelligence Support Center, Operation Hemisphere Program, for the Sheriff's Department for the period of August 1, 2008-July 31, 2009 at an estimated cost of $910,705.
06/09/09	grant	$1,226,649	Accept 2009 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area grant funds in the total amount of $1,226,649 for the Major Drug Squad, Houston Money Laundering, Houston Intelligence Support Center, Truck, Air, Rail, and Port, Gang and Non-Traditional Gang Squad, and Houston Intelligence Support Center-Operation Hemisphere initiatives.
01/12/10	sole source services	$391,172	AT&T in the amount of $391,172 for Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the Sheriff's Department.
05/11/10	grant	$450,000	Accept an amendment to an agreement with the Office of National Drug Control Policy for 2009 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area supplemental grant funds in the amount of $450,000 for the Houston Intelligence Support Center-Operation Hemisphere Initiative.
07/27/10	sole source services	$469,407	AT&T in the amount of $469,407 for Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the Sheriff’s Department.
09/14/10	grant	$924,500	Accept 2010 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Grant funds in the amount of $924,500 for the Operation Hemisphere initiative.
02/08/11	sole source services	$924,500	AT&T sole source for Operation Hemisphere, formerly Hudson Hawk, investigative services for the Sheriff’s Department in the amount of $924,500.
01/24/12	grant	$666,667	Accept High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Grant funds in the additional amount of $666,667 from the Office of National Drug Control Policy for the Houston Intelligence Support Center – Operation Hemisphere Initiative.
05/08/12	sole source services	$762,111	AT&T in the amount of $762,111 for Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the Sheriff’s Department for the period ending June 30, 2012.
11/06/12	grant	$373,795	An amendment to an agreement with the Office of National Drug Control Policy for additional High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Grant funds in the amount of $373,795 for the Houston Intelligence Support Center-Operation Hemisphere Initiative
01/29/13	sole source service	$373,795	AT&T in the amount of $373,795 sole source for Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the Sheriff’s Department for the period ending June 30, 2013.