US Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is blowing the whistle on a secretive surveillance program that permits federal, state, local and Tribal law enforcement agencies to surveil over a trillion domestic phone records annually.
The Democrat lawmaker called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to publicly disclose all documents related to the Hemisphere phone surveillance program.
In 2013, the White House funding for Hemisphere was suspended after it was exposed by the New York Times, but that same year, federal funding for the program continued under "a new generic sounding name, 'Data Analytical Services,'" Wyden notes, in his letter to the DOJ. "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.
Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, and Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif introduced the Government Surveillance Reform Act earlier this month to crackdown on the federal government's "Disturbing" misuse of surveillance authorities.
In May, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in consultation with the Department of Justice released a redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion confirming the FBI misused the Section 702 database over 278,000 times, including data it collected in its search of information related to people suspected of protesting at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, donors to congressional candidates and protesters arrested after the death of George Floyd.
Rep. Andy Biggs wrote, "I just contacted the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Director in response to disturbing new info related to a mass surveillance program called The Hemisphere Project. These programs are all about CONTROL over Americans."
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