For more than a decade, a secretive surveillance program overseen by the White House has granted law enforcement agencies access to Americans’ private phone records, according to a letter sent to the Department of Justice last week. The Data Analytical Services (DAS), operating in partnership with telecom giant AT&T, has provided federal, state, and local investigators with trillions of domestic call records from unsuspecting users, raising urgent concerns about citizens’ privacy.
First reported by tech publication Wired last week, a letter from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden (D) to Attorney General Merrick Garland challenges the legality of the “long-running dragnet surveillance program in which the White House pays AT&T to provide…often-warrantless searches of trillions of domestic phone records.”
According to Wyden’s findings, the Data Analytical Services—previously called the Hemisphere Project—is a joint operation between AT&T and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), once referred to as “AT&T’s Super Search Engine.”
Through a technique known as “chain analysis,” law enforcement agencies at all levels of government can access the phone records of criminal targets, as well as anyone they’ve contacted, anyone those people have contacted, and so on. Chain analysis searches are not limited to drug-related investigations, nor are they even limited to those suspected of criminal activity.
While the partnership between ONDCP and AT&T officially began in 2007, Wyden’s letter alleges that the Hemisphere Project was able to access records going back as far as 1987—and 4 billion records are added to the database every day. More than one trillion records per year have been turned over to the DAS.
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The methodology behind the DAS differs from traditional wiretapping in that it does not require a warrant based on probable cause. Instead, the program acquires details like the names and numbers of callers and recipients, as well as dates, times, and durations of calls directly from AT&T. The company is not legally obligated to store this information or provide it to law enforcement, meaning that its participation in the program is entirely voluntary—and likely motivated by financial gain.
Records further indicate that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program since 2009, which is then passed on to AT&T as payment via “an obscure grant program, enabling [the DAS] to skip an otherwise mandatory federal privacy review.”
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According to Senator Wyden, the DAS has largely flown under the radar under three different presidential administrations despite its massive scale. However, one notable incident in 2013 led to the Hemisphere Project being exposed to the public through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The New York Times published the details of that report, even revealing that government officials had been instructed to never “refer to Hemisphere in any official documents.” In response to this report, the program was suspended…but only temporarily.
“White House funding for this program was suspended by the Obama Administration in 2013, the same year the program was exposed by the press, but continued with other federal funding under a new generic sounding program name, ‘Data Analytical Services,’” Wyden wrote. “ONDCP funding for this surveillance program was quietly resumed by the Trump Administration in 2017, paused again in 2021, the first year of the Biden Administration, and then quietly restarted again in 2022.”
Concluding his letter, Wyden stresses his “serious concerns about the legality of this surveillance program” based on “troubling information that would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” The senator is now calling on the Department of Justice to publicly release all documentation pertaining to the Data Analytical Services.
Representatives from the White House and AT&T have not commented on Senator Wyden’s allegations.
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