US Government Secretly Collecting Trillion Phone Records
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
WASHINGTON (Worthy News) – The U.S. government has been secretly collecting and analyzing more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to published documents.
The program, which was formerly known as Hemisphere, is run by telecom giant AT&T with federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, Worthy News monitored.
A letter obtained by leading American technology magazine WIRED showed that the Data Analytical Services (DAS) was used for the secret monitoring program.
The DAS program run captures and analyzes U.S. call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to American customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo.
Records showed the White House provided more than $6 million to the program that allowed the targeting of records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure.
The infrastructure includes a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.
In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden expressed “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program.
“TROUBLING INFORMATION”
He added that “troubling information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.”
That information, which Wyden said the U.S. Department Of Justice confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified” by Washington, sources said.
That meant that while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator’s letter.
AT&T declined to comment on the DAS program, saying only that the company is legally required to comply with a lawful subpoena.
After the news broke, the conservative Fox News Channel was quick to advise readers on its website to “use alternative communication methods” that do not rely on the Biden administration’s backed “AT&T’s infrastructure or phone network.”
For example, “you could use email, chat or video calls over the internet, or you could use a landline or a payphone.”
Fox also advised readers “to protect” the content of phone calls with “encryption, which scrambles the data so that only the intended recipient can decode it.”
ENCRYPTION CALLS
There are some applications, or ‘apps’ in mobile phones “that offer end-to-end encryption for voice calls” such as messenger services Signal, WhatsApp, or Telegram.
A third way to protect from phone surveillance is to use privacy tools and practices to help reduce or hide a digital footprint and identity.
People could use a virtual private network (VPN), which can mask an internet protocol (IP) address and location.
Yet, the revelations of massive surveillance were expected to raise concerns among critics, including former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
He exposed the scale of secret surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) and received a Russian passport last year.
U.S. authorities have for years wanted Snowden to return to the United States to face a criminal trial on espionage charges, but he has been offered asylum in Russia, where he received a Russian passport.
Evidence that the NSA was secretly building a vast database of U.S. telephone records including millions of mobile calls – was seen as the most explosive of the Snowden revelations.
DEFENDING PROGRAM
Until that moment, top intelligence officials publicly insisted the NSA never knowingly collected information on Americans at all.
After the program’s exposure, U.S. officials claimed the program helped in fighting domestic extremism.
They cited the case of four San Diego residents who were accused of providing aid to religious fanatics in Somalia.
U.S. officials insisted that the four – Basaaly Saeed Moalin, Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud, Mohamed Mohamud, and Issa Doreh – were convicted in 2013 thanks to the NSA’s telephone record spying.
However, a court later ruled those claims were “inconsistent with the contents of the classified record.”
And the latest revelations were expected to cause more legal and political wrangling.
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