Democrat Senator tells the AG to stop the White House from phone spying. We know it’s not Joey cause we know his mental state, but Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday expressing “serious concerns about the legality” of a surveillance program run out of the Biden White House called “Data Analytical Services.”
We have this from Wired, And if you’re wondering, this was started about 10 years ago. And who was in the WH back then? You guessed it, the same folks who control the WH today.
A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year.
First disclosed by The New York Times in September 2013 as Hemisphere, the DAS program—renamed in 2013—has since flown largely under the radar. Internal records concerning the program’s secrecy that were obtained by the newspaper at the time show that law enforcement had long been instructed to never “refer to Hemisphere in any official document.”
Following the Times’ story, former US president Barack Obama reportedly suspended funding for the Hemisphere program in 2013. And while discretionary funding was withheld over the following three years, a White House memo obtained by WIRED shows that individual law enforcement organizations across the US were permitted to continue contracting with AT&T directly in order to maintain access to its data-mining service. Last year, under president Joe Biden, the funding resumed once more, the memo says.
