11/20/23, 1:13 PM Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records | WIRED

DELL CAMERON DHRUV MEHROTRA SECURITY NOV 20, 2023 1:25 PM

Secretive White House Surveillance

Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of
US Phone Records
A WIRED analysis of leaked police documents verifies that a secretive
government program is allowing federal, state, and local law enforcement
to access phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

PHOTOGRAPH: PANITHAN PHOLPANICHRASSAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

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11/20/23, 1:13 PM Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records | WIRED

SAVE

A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone

records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained
that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on
Sunday, challenging the program’s legality.

According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical

Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law
enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone
records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims.
Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in
direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those
individuals have been in contact as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the
telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law
enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs
offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo
reviewed by WIRED. Records reviewed by WIRED show that the White House has,
for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the
targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of
routers and switches that crisscross the United States.

In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he

had “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program, adding that “troubling
information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other
members of Congress.” That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially
provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified” by the US government,
meaning 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 spokesperson Kim Hart Jonson declined WIRED’s request to comment on the
DAS program, saying only that the company is required by law to comply with a
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lawful subpoena.

There is no law requiring AT&T to store decades’ worth of Americans’ call records for
law enforcement purposes. Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials
have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train
police officials on how best to utilize AT&T’s voluntary, albeit revenue-generating,
assistance.
In 2020, the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets published
hundreds of gigabytes of law enforcement data stolen from agencies around the US.
A WIRED review of the files unearths extraordinary detail regarding the processes
and justifications that agencies use to monitor the call records of not only criminal
suspects, but of their spouses, children, parents, and friends. While DAS is intended
to exclusively target drug-related crimes, a leaked file from the Northern California
Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) shows that local police agencies, such as those
in Daly City and Oakland, requested DAS data for unsolved cases seemingly
unrelated to drugs.

In one instance, an officer with the Oakland Police Department asked for a
“Hemisphere analysis” to identify the phone number of a suspect by analyzing the
calls of the suspect’s close friends. In another, a San Jose law enforcement officer
asked his regional HIDTA to identify a victim and material witness in an unspecified
case. One officer, soliciting information from AT&T under the program, wrote: “We
obtained six months of call data for [suspect]'s phone, as well as several close
associations (his girlfriend, father, sister, mother).” The records do not indicate how
AT&T responds to every request.

Leaked law enforcement files further show that a range of officials—from a US

Postal Service inspector to a New York Department of Corrections parole officer—
participated in DAS training sessions. Other participants include port authorities and
members of US Immigration & Customs Enforcement, National Guard, and
California Highway Patrol, alongside scores of smaller agencies.

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

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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. Funding resumed under former president Donald Trump but
was halted again in 2021, according to the White House memo. Last year, under
president Joe Biden, the funding resumed once more, the memo says.
The White House acknowledged an inquiry from WIRED but has yet to provide a
comment.

THE DAS PROGRAM is maintained under an affiliated program called HIDTA,

funded by the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).
HIDTA, or “high-intensity drug trafficking area,” is a designation assigned to 33
different regions of the US, according to the White House. The first five regions,
mapped out in 1990, included areas around Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, New York,
and the entire US-Mexico border, some of the nation’s most active drug trafficking
areas.

The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil
requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not
include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a range of
identifying information, such as the caller and recipient’s names, phone numbers,
and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time.
Documents released under public records laws show the DAS program has been
used to produce location information on criminal suspects and their known
associates, a practice deemed unconstitutional without a warrant in 2018.

“Requests concerning location information require the highest level of legal

demand, which is a court-issued warrant, except in emergency situations,” AT&T’s
Hart Jonson says.

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Orders targeting a nexus of individuals are sometimes called “community of

interest” subpoenas, a phrase that among privacy advocates is synonymous with
dragnet surveillance.

“The scale of the data available to and routinely searched for the benefit of law
enforcement under the Hemisphere Project is stunning in its scope,” Wyden’s letter
to Garland says.

The White House has provided at least $6.1 million in discretionary funding to the
DAS program since 2013, according to a two-page memo authored last year by
White House officials. An internal HIDTA “participant guide” reviewed by WIRED
shows that HIDTA funding exceeded $280 million in 2020 alone. It remains unclear
how much HIDTA funding is spent to support AT&T’s vast collection of American call
records.

It is not currently known how far back the call records accessible under DAS go. A
slide deck released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014 states that up to
10 years’ worth of records can be queried under the program, a statistic that
contrasts with other internal documents that claimed AT&T could reach decades into
the past. AT&T’s competitors, meanwhile, typically retain call records for no more
than two years. (The necessity for phone companies to track call records for
extended periods of time has gradually decreased with the disappearance of long-
distance charges.)
THE DAS PROGRAM echoes multiple dragnet surveillance programs dating back
decades, including a Drug Enforcement Agency program launched in 1992 that
forced phone companies to surrender records of virtually all calls going to and from
over 100 other countries; the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata collection
program, which the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals deemed illegal in 2014; and
the Call Details Records program, which suffered from “technical irregularities”
leading the NSA to collect millions of calls it was “not authorized to receive.”

Unlike these past programs, which were subject to congressional oversight, DAS is
not. A senior Wyden aide tells WIRED the program takes advantage of numerous
“loopholes” in federal privacy law. The fact that it’s effectively run out of the White
House, for example, means it is exempt from rules requiring assessments of its

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privacy impacts. The White House is also exempt from the Freedom of Information
Act, reducing the public’s overall ability to shed light on the program.

Because AT&T’s call record collection occurs along a telecommunications

“backbone,” protections enshrined under the Electronic Communications Privacy
Act may not apply to the program.

Earlier this month, Wyden and other lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced
comprehensive privacy legislation known as the Government Surveillance Reform
Act. The bill contains numerous provisions that, if enacted, would patch most if not
all of these loopholes, effectively rendering the DAS program, in its current form,
explicitly illegal.

READ WYDEN’S FULL letter to the US Department of Justice below:

The Honorable Merrick B. Garland

Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001

Dear Attorney General Garland:

I write to request that you clear for public release additional information about the
Hemisphere Project. This is a long-running dragnet surveillance program in which
the White House pays AT&T to provide all federal, state, local, and Tribal law
enforcement agencies the ability to request often-warrantless searches of trillions
of domestic phone records.

In 2013, the New York Times revealed the existence of a surveillance program in
which the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) pays AT&T
to mine its customers’ records for the benefit of federal, state, local, and Tribal law
enforcement agencies. According to an ONDCP slide deck, AT&T has kept and
queries as part of the Hemisphere Project call records going back to 1987, with 4
billion new records being added every day. That slide deck was apparently disclosed
by a local law enforcement agency in response to a public information request and
was published by the New York Times in 2013.
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The scale of the data available to and routinely searched for the benefit of law
enforcement under the Hemisphere Project is stunning in its scope. One law
enforcement official described the Hemisphere Project as “AT&T's Super Search
Engine” and ... "Google on Steroids,” according to emails released by the Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) under the Freedom of Information Act. The
ONDCP slide deck and an email released by the DEA also reveal that AT&T searches
records kept by its wholesale division, which carries communications on behalf of
other communications companies and their customers. Another slide deck released
by ONDCP and published by the press in 2014 describes the specific capabilities of
Hemisphere, including that it can be used to identify alternate numbers used by a
target, obtain location data and “two levels of call detail records for one target
number” (meaning the phone records of everyone who communicated with the
target).

The Hemisphere Project has been supported by regular funding from the White
House ONDCP since 2009, according to the attached undated white paper that
ONDCP provided to my office on October 27, 2022 (Appendix A). That same
document reveals that 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.” 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.

Although the Hemisphere Project is paid for with federal funds, they are delivered to
AT&T through an obscure grant program, enabling the program to skip an otherwise
mandatory federal privacy review. If the funds came directly from a federal agency,
such as the DEA, Hemisphere would have been subjected to a mandatory Privacy
Impact Assessment conducted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Privacy
and Civil Liberties, the findings of which would be made public. Instead, ONDCP
provides funding for the program through the Houston High Intensity Drug
Trafficking Area (HIDTA), one of 33 regional funding organizations as a part of a
grant program created by Congress and administered by ONDCP. The HIDTAs
distribute federal anti-drug law enforcement grants to state and local agencies, and

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are governed by a board made up entirely of federal, state and local law
enforcement officials.
ONDCP provided my staff with an undated white paper describing the program and
its historical funding levels, but ONDCP directed all questions about Hemisphere to
the Houston HIDTA. Officials at the Houston HIDTA provided my office with a
briefing on November 7, 2022, and spoke again with my staff again by phone on
December 1, 2022. The Houston HIDTA officials told my staff that all Hemisphere
requests are sent to a single AT&T analyst located in Atlanta, Georgia, and that any
law enforcement officer working for one of the federal, state, local and Tribal law
enforcement agencies in the U.S. can contact the AT&T Hemisphere analyst directly
to request they run a query, with varying authorization requirements. The Houston
HIDTA officials confirmed that Federal and state law enforcement agencies can
request a Hemisphere search with a subpoena, which is a directive that many law
enforcement agencies can issue themselves (except in California and Texas, where a
court order is required by state law). They also explained that Hemisphere searches
are not required to be in support of drug-related investigations.

For the past year, I have urged the DOJ to release dozens of pages of material
related to the Hemisphere Project, which it first provided to my office in 2019. This
information has been designated “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” which is meant to
restrict its public release. I have serious concerns about the legality of this
surveillance program, and the materials provided by the DOJ contain troubling
information that would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of
Congress. While I have long defended the government’s need to protect classified
sources and methods, this surveillance program is not classified and its existence
has already been acknowledged by the DOJ in federal court. The public interest in
an informed debate about government surveillance far outweighs the need to keep
this information secret. To that end, I urge you to promptly clear for public release
the material described in Appendix B.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

Sincerely,

Ron Wyden

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United States Senator

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Dell Cameron is an investigative journalist in Texas covering national security and tech policy. He's a
recipient of multiple Society of Professional Journalists awards and co-recipient of an Edward R. Murrow
Award for Investigative Reporting. Previously, he was a senior reporter at Gizmodo and staff writer for the
Daily Dot.

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Dhruv Mehrotra (he/him) is an investigative data reporter for WIRED. He uses technology to find, build, and
analyze datasets for storytelling. Before joining WIRED, he worked for the Center for Investigative
Reporting and was a researcher at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. At
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