At the behest of White House officials, a surveillance initiative gave law enforcement agencies clearcut and open-ended access to the phone records of millions of Americans. Privacy and legal advocates have become enraged at this revelation.
Only uncovered through a Wired magazine investigation, the White House has permitted US federal, state, and local authorities to have unrestricted access to thousands of phone records. Referred to as the Data Analytical Services (DAS), it was done exclusively with the cooperation of AT&T.
Once thought the king of customer security, they sold out their decades of experience in low-income and rural areas to the US government and the Biden administration. This deal explicitly offers up the phone records of criminals, their known criminal associates, plus legal and law-abiding citizens who aren’t under investigation.
By their records, DAS has tracked over a trillion phone records per year. Previously called Hemisphere, the group has begun using a new analysis technique called chain analysis. With this, they connect criminal enterprises to other people simply by associated phone numbers, thus skipping a wiretap. It can be analyzed quickly, and it is entirely made up of phone records kept by AT&T.
These record books aren’t required to be held for a long time by federal law, it’s just something AT&T does on their own (allegedly). They consist of callers and recipients, phone numbers, and the dates and times of calls; thus, all the details they need. This kind of snitching on the American people should be more than enough to send people who learn of it running to a new number and a new network.
With the White House over the program, the Freedom of Information Act prevents much of the info on the program from getting out. It is only through recent leaks and hacks that much is being learned about this program. Using everything from postal inspectors to parole officers being noted as receiving DAS training, it is being used everywhere and frequently.
