A little-known surveillance program has tracked the US phone records of millions of Americans, according to a new bombshell report.
“[A] The surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to dig into the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime. , including the victims,” confirmed Wired magazine.
“Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct telephone contact with a suspected criminal, but anyone with whom those people have been in contact as well,” the magazine. reported this week.
Formerly known as Hemisphere, the DAS program is run “in coordination” with AT&T.
Word of the program comes from Sen. Ron Wyden, who sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday challenging the program’s legitimacy.
“This is a long-running surveillance program in which the White House pays AT&T to give all federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies the ability to request billions in often warrantless searches of national telephone records.”, says the letter.
@RonWyden letter questions the legality of the #Hemisphere #vigilance program, which gives agencies access to trillions of data points, usually without warrants. This is why Congress must support bipartisanship, bicameralism #GSRA a #fixfisa.https://t.co/7XCXUYGwmh
— Privacy and Surveillance Accountability Project (@savingprivacy) November 22, 2023
Note that AT&T does this voluntarily, presumably for profit.
“There is no law requiring AT&T to store decades of Americans’ call records for law enforcement purposes. Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences law in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officers on how best to use AT&T’s volunteering, though revenue generatorsupport,” notes Wired.
Additionally, records show the White House has given the program $6 million over the years. That said, to his credit, former President Barack Obama stopped funding the program at the federal level after the New York Times initially exposed it in 2013.
“However, individual law enforcement agencies were able to continue to contract directly with AT&T to use the service.” Fox News notes
In addition, former President Donald Trump later reinstated federal funding, though current President Joe Biden rescinded it when he took office in 2021.
Regardless, in 2020, a non-profit whistleblower organization known as Distributed Denial of Secrets reportedly obtained and released a large number of law enforcement documents.
In reviewing the files, Wired magazine discovered “an extraordinary detail[s] regarding the processes and justifications agencies use to monitor the call records not only of criminal suspects, but of their spouses, children, parents and friends.”
“While DAS is operated under a dedicated drug trafficking program, a leaked file from the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) shows that local police agencies, such as those in Daly City and Oakland, requested DAS data for unsolved cases apparently unrelated to drugs,” notes Wired.
1/ ICYMI: A recent one @White House note obtained and reported by @WIRED shows that a massive dragnet surveillance program, which without justification collects the phone records of trillions of Americans, is now being phased out of the White House. Sound familiar?https://t.co/ValuLulcZW
— Privacy and Surveillance Accountability Project (@savingprivacy) November 21, 2023
In one case, an Oakland Police Department officer used “Hemisphere,” as it was still called at the time, to screen the calls of a suspect’s close friends so that officer could find the phone number of the suspect
In another case, an officer with the San Jose Police Department asked the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center “to identify a victim and a material witness in an unspecified case,” Wired notes.
“An official, requesting information from AT&T under the program, wrote: ‘We obtained six months of call data for [suspect]the phone of ‘as well as several close associations (his girlfriend, father, sister, mother).’ The records do not indicate how AT&T responds to each request,” according to Wired.
All of this raises serious concerns about the privacy and civil liberties of everyday Americans, especially since the program operates without any judicial oversight or public accountability.
According to Fox News, the program “also contradicts the spirit of the USA Freedom Act, which was passed in 2015 to reform the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of phone records.”
“The act required the NSA to stop collecting phone records in bulk and instead request them from phone companies on a case-by-case basis with a court order. However, the DAS program circumvents this requirement by allowing AT&T to collect and store records for law enforcement purposes,” Fox News notes.
In response to news of the show, social media users were upset but not necessarily surprised.
Look at:
NOTHING surprises me anymore.
— vladROBOT (@vvladROBOT) November 21, 2023
Does this surprise anyone? Government throughout history has done more
— Mark Calvert (@Markcow45) November 20, 2023
What happened to probable cause and due process? Our rights are being taken away and soon we will have none. Just what the elites have in mind.
— Raye Lecure (@RayeLecure) November 21, 2023
Seems like a flagrant violation of 4A to me.
We must have real consequences for the violation of the constitutional right of Citizens.
I vote in favor of immediate expulsion from office without the possibility of running again.
The Constitution needs teeth.
— Justin Moses (@realJMoses) November 20, 2023
— Rob Stone (@TheStoneRL) November 21, 2023
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