Even Democrats are pushing back against Biden’s police state.
US Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is blowing the whistle on a secretive surveillance program that permits federal, state, local and Tribal law enforcement agencies to surveil over a trillion domestic phone records annually.
On Sunday, Sen. Wyden sent a letter to the Department of Justice warning the Data Analytical Services, formerly known as Hemisphere Project, illegally authorizes government agencies to track, monitor Americans’ calls and analyze the phone records of everyday people who are not suspected of committing any crime, including victims of crimes.
The Democrat lawmaker called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to publicly disclose all documents related to the Hemisphere phone surveillance program. While the documents are not classified, the Justice Department has categorized them as “Law Enforcement Sensitive” to prevent them from being publicly released.
Hemisphere relies on chain analysis, a technique that facilitates government agencies to spy on the targeted individuals as well as anyone who has been in contact with the targeted individual without warrants.
“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,” Wyden wrote in a letter to Garland. “While I have long defended the government’s need to protect classified sources and methods, this surveillance program is not classified and its existence has already been acknowledged by the DOJ in federal court.
“The public interest in an informed debate about government surveillance outweighs the need to keep this information secret.”
Hemisphere is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T. AT&T captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriff’s departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country.
In 2009, The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy began paying AT&T to allow all law enforcement agencies to probe AT&T customers’ phone records as far back as 1987.
All calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure, a matrix of routers and switches across the United States, are subject to targeting by the DAS program. Information collected includes caller and recipient names, phone numbers, and dates and times of calls.
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