Report Claims White House Secret Phone Surveillance Program Has Been Spying on Millions of Americans for Years

by Mindy Cohn

A secretive White House phone surveillance program called Data Analytical Services (DAS)  allows law enforcement agencies access to trillions of American phone records without a warrant and has been monitoring calls made by millions of AT&T customers for more than ten years according to a report by WIRED magazine which broke the story this week. 

The report alleges that DAS through its partnership with AT&T has tracked over a trillion domestic phone records annually using a  chain analysis that targets not only those who are speaking directly with criminal suspects but also anyone else contacted after a caller is linked to a criminal suspect call. The expanded target list means even innocent conversationalists with no connection to crimes have had their records collected without their knowledge or consent.

"The program allows law enforcement agencies to access the records of any calls that use AT&T's infrastructure," the WIRED report states. These records include "phone numbers, dates, times, durations and locations of the calls" as well as AT&T subscriber names and addresses which many claim is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

AT&T's response when it was called to task for permitting the breach of privacy was that it is forced to comply with a lawful subpoena.

While countless lawsuits and records requests have worked over the years to expose DAS, given the significant privacy and legal concerns, those efforts have yet to be successful as DAS ducks out from such requests by claiming the phone records are owned by AT&T rather than the government.