A senator has complained that American law enforcement agencies snoop on US citizens and residents, seemingly without regard for the privacy provisions of the Fourth Amendment, under a secret program called the Hemisphere Project that allows police to conduct searches of trillions of phone records.
According to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), these searches “usually” happen without warrants. And after more than a decade of keeping people — lawmakers included — in the dark about Hemisphere, Wyden wants the Justice Department to reveal information about what he called a “long-running dragnet surveillance program.”
“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,” Wyden wrote in a letter [PDF] to US Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Under Hemisphere, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) pays telco AT&T to provide all federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies with the ability to request searches of trillions of domestic phone records dating back to at least 1987, plus the four billion call records added every day.