Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is questioning the legality of a White House surveillance program that allows law enforcement to access Americans’ phone records.
Wyden is calling for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to publish information on a program called Data Analytical Services (DAS), formerly known as the Hemisphere Project.
The move comes as the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) paid AT&T over $5 million for Americans’ records since 2009 in an effort Wyden believes to be illegal.
“I write to request that you clear for public release additional information about the Hemisphere Project,” Wyden wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. “This is a long-running dragnet surveillance program in which the White House pays AT&T to provide all federal, state, local, and Tribal law enforcement agencies the ability to request often-warrantless searches of trillions of domestic phone records.”
“In 2013, the New York Times revealed the existence of a surveillance program in which the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) pays AT&T to mine its customers’ records for the benefit of federal, state, local, and Tribal law enforcement agencies,” the letter continued. “According to an ONDCP slide deck, AT&T has kept and queries as part of the Hemisphere Project call records going back to 1987, with 4 billion new records being added every day.”
The senator explained that the Hemisphere Project’s funds are delivered to AT&T through an “obscure grant program,” allowing the program to “skip an otherwise mandatory federal privacy review.”
“If the funds came directly from a federal agency, such as the DEA, Hemisphere would have been subjected to a mandatory Privacy Impact Assessment conducted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties, the findings of which would be made public.”
“For the past year, I have urged the DOJ to release dozens of pages of material related to the Hemisphere Project, which it first provided to my office in 2019,” Wyden wrote. “This information has been designated ‘Law Enforcement Sensitive,’ which is meant to restrict its public release. I have serious concerns about the legality of this surveillance program, and the materials provided by the DOJ contain troubling information that would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.”
The senator noted that this “surveillance program is not classified,” adding that the “public interest in an informed debate about government surveillance far outweighs the need to keep this information secret.”
Wyden and others are behind the recently introduced Government Surveillance Reform Act, which seeks to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
According to a press release, the bill “would require a court order for surveillance of Americans’ phone records, the same standard currently required for the government to obtain historical email and instant message metadata records.”
