By Kayla Meraz
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Data Analytical Services (DAS) has allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to access and analyze U.S. citizens’ calls, including those without a criminal conviction, according to WIRED.
Chain analysis is a technique used not only to target those in close contact with suspected criminals but also with the contacts of those individuals, noted 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 U.S. Senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ), challenging the program’s legality.
According to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED, the DAS program is operated in cooperation with AT&T that seizes and conducts analysis of any call record for law enforcement agencies. It noted the White House has also contributed more than $6 million to the program to target phone records that use AT&T’s infrastructure.
Wyden wrote in a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland of his “serious concerns about the legality” of DAS including “troubling information he’d received would justifiable outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” He added federal officials are prohibited from disclosing this information to the public.
Kim Hart Johnson, AT&T’s spokesperson, declined to comment on the DAS program as requested by WIRED, stating in a response from the company that information is only gathered through lawful subpoena.
In order to educate police officials on how to make the most of AT&T’s volunteer help, documents seen by WIRED reveal that as recently as 2018, AT&T representatives attended law enforcement conferences in Texas.
The Distributed Denial of Secrets published hundreds of gigabytes, in 2020, of law enforcement data that agencies have stolen around the United States. The process and justifications utilized by agencies to monitor call records of non-criminals was uncovered by WIRED’s review of the files.
One officer that solicited information from AT&T under DAS wrote, “We obtained six months of call data for (suspect)s phone, as well as several close associations (his girlfriend, father, sister, mother).”
A range of officials, including the National Guard, US Immigration & Customs Enforcement, and California Highway Patrol have participated in DAS training that was uncovered from leaked law enforcement files, said WIRED.
The New York Times first disclosed the secretive DAS program in September of 2013 but the program has gone largely unnoticed.
The Time’s story has noted how the former US president Barack Obama suspended the funding for the program, but the funding was then resumed under Donald Trump to be halted again in 2021, and reportedly resumed once more under Joe Biden.
Law enforcement organizations in the US were allowed to continue contracting with AT&T to maintain its data-mining service, disclosed a White House memo that WIRED obtained.
HIDTA (high-intensity drug trafficking area), a program that allowed the DAS to be maintained, receives funding from the White House, said WIRED.
“Documents released under public records laws show the DAS program has been used to produce location information on criminal suspects and their known associates, a practice deemed unconstitutional without a warrant in 2018,” WIRED reported.
White House officials wrote a memo stating that “the White House has provided at least $6.1 million in discretionary funding to the DAS program since 2013,” wrote WIRED after reviewing documents that showcased HIDTA’s 2020 fundings exceeded $280 million.
Several surveillance programs dating back decades have been released through the DAS program and some have now been deemed illegal to obtain or use, said WIRED.
DAS is not subject to congressional review and the program takes advantage of multiple “loopholes” in federal privacy legislation, a senior Wyden staffer told WIRED, adding it is not subject to regulations demanding evaluations of its privacy consequences since it is essentially operated out of the White House.
Additionally, the White House is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, which limits the public’s ability to learn more about the program, noted WIRED, adding that the protections of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act may not be applicable to the program because AT&T’s call records are collected along a telecommunications “backbone.”
The Government Surveillance Reform Act is comprehensive privacy legislation introduced by Wyden and other lawmakers in the House and Senate. Many of the provisions in the bill, if they were to become law, would close most of these gaps and make the DAS program explicitly unlawful in its current form, said WIRED.
