Another troubling government surveillance program has been exposed. The program involves the state working with a major cell phone service provider to gather information on Americans’ phone conversations and raises concerns about government agencies using the data to violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights.
The Data Analytical Services (DAS) program, a clandestine government surveillance initiative has been in operation for more than a decade. Through this initiative, the state has been tracking an astonishing volume of over one trillion domestic phone records each year.
Even more disturbing is that the program encompasses ordinary, law-abiding citizens across the country, which should raise concerns about privacy and civil liberties. The details of the program were revealed by WIRED.
A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program’s legality.
According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.
The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.
Details about the program came to light when Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent a letter to the Justice Department questioning its constitutionality.
In several cases, police officers were able to gather an astounding amount of information on suspects and their families through the program.
In one instance, an officer with the Oakland Police Department asked for a “Hemisphere analysis” to identify the phone number of a suspect by analyzing the calls of the suspect’s close friends. In another, a San Jose law enforcement officer asked the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center to identify a victim and material witness in an unspecified case. One officer, soliciting information from AT&T under the program, wrote: “We obtained six months of call data for [suspect]'s phone, as well as several close associations (his girlfriend, father, sister, mother).” The records do not indicate how AT&T responds to every request.
The fact that this program has been operating in the absence of judicial oversight and public accountability adds another alarming layer to this issue. It appears to be highly problematic from a Fourth Amendment perspective and flouts the reforms of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, which required the National Security Agency to stop the bulk collection of phone records and mandated that the agency obtain this data from phone companies with a court order on a case-by-case basis. DAS allows the state to subvert this law by enabling AT&T to collect and store these records for law enforcement purposes.
The program has received funding off and on through various administrations, starting with Obama’s.
The DAS program is funded by the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) under a program called HIDTA, or "high-intensity drug trafficking area." HIDTA is a designation assigned to 33 different regions of the U.S. where drug trafficking is considered to be a serious problem.
Former President Barack Obama reportedly suspended the funding for the program in 2013 after The New York Times exposed it for the first time. However, individual law enforcement agencies were allowed to continue contracting with AT&T directly to use the service.
Former President Donald Trump resumed the funding for the program in 2017 but halted it again in 2021. President Biden resumed the funding for the program in 2021 but has not commented on it publicly.
The program’s extensive use of phone records without specific suspicion of criminal activity contravenes the protections provided by the Fourth Amendment. DAS casts a wide net over the general public and functions as a workaround method to avoid having to observe probable cause or obtain warrants. The initiative presents a serious threat to liberty, especially since it functions largely unchecked by the government. The pressing question is: Will Congress actually do something about it?
