Secret White House surveillance program gives cops access to trillions of US phone records

The DAS program echoes several trawler surveillance programs dating back decades, including a Drug Enforcement Agency program launched in 1992 this forced the telephone companies to hand over the records of virtually all calls that went there from more than 100 other countries; of the National Security Agency bulk metadata collection program, which the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit deemed illegal in 2014; and the Call Details Records program, which suffered “technical irregularities” led the NSA to collect millions of calls it was “not authorized to receive.”

Unlike these previous programs, which were subject to congressional oversight, DAS is not. A senior Wyden aide tells WIRED that the program takes advantage of numerous “loopholes” in federal privacy law. The fact that it’s effectively gone from the White House, for example, means it’s exempt from rules that require assessments of its privacy impacts. The White House is also exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, which reduces the general public’s ability to shed light on the program.

Because AT&T’s collection of call records occurs along a telecommunications “backbone,” the protections enshrined in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act may not apply to the program.

Earlier this month, Wyden and other lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced comprehensive privacy legislation known as the Government Surveillance Reform Act. The bill contains numerous provisions that, if enacted, would address most, if not all, of these loopholes, effectively making the DAS program, in its current form, explicitly illegal.

Read Wyden’s in full letter to the US Department of Justice below:

The Honorable Merrick B. Garland
Justice Minister
US Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001

Dear Attorney General Garland:

I am writing to request that you provide additional information about the Hemisphere project for public disclosure. 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.

In 2013, the New York Times revealed the existence of a surveillance program in which the White House’s Office of National Drug Control (ONDCP) paid AT&T to mine customer records for the benefit of federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement. agencies According to an ONDCP slide deck, AT&T has preserved and consults as part of Project Hemisphere call records dating back to 1987, with 4 billion new records being added every day. This slide deck was apparently revealed by a local law enforcement agency in response to a public information request and was published by the New York Times in 2013.