The Biden administration has been caught giving police departments access to the phone records of millions of Americans with a secret spy program administered through the Department of Justice.
The DOJ’s secretive program was uncovered by US senator Ron Wyden (D, OR) who is challenging the legality of the program, according to WIRED magazine.
Wyden reports that the DOJ’s Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than ten years given policing agencies all across the country access to America’s phone records without a warrant or any evidence that the Americans under investigation even did anything wrong.
Not only is the DOJ freely giving up records of people police agencies want information on, they are also giving up the information of anyone those “suspects” had been in contact with.
Per WIRED:
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 show that the White House has 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.
WIRED has much more in its report on this issue.
But folks, the fact is your personal information is not at all secure in the hands of business or government because today there is no separate of business and state.
If this should not give you pause, nothing will.
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