Police officers now have access to trillions of U.S. phone records, thanks to secret White House surveillance program

For at least the past 10 years, the federal government has been running a secret spying and surveillance program that allows law enforcement across the country to access domestic phone records at will.

The program, known as Data Analytical Services (DAS), has for more than a decade allowed federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to mine details about the calls Americans make, including analyzing the specific phone records of people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims.

We learned about this secret spying program from a letter that was recently sent by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to the Department of Justice (DOJ) challenging its legality. DAS is especially concerning because it utilizes a technique called chain analysis that targets not just people who directly call a criminal suspect but also others with whom these same people may have been in contact.

Formerly known as Hemisphere, DAS operates in coordination with telecommunications giant AT&T, which captures and analyzes U.S. call records on behalf of the nation’s law enforcement agencies, according to a White House memo.

The White House has reportedly contributed more than $6 million to the program, which in essence allows the government to target the records of all calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure, described by WIRED as “a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.”