Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter To fellow senators on Wednesday, revealing that three major US mobile carriers had no provisions to alert legislators about government applications for surveillance, despite the contractual requirement to do so.
In the letter, Wyden, a Democrat and a long member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that a survey by his staff found that AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon did not inform the Senators of the Legal Requests-including the White House-for the White House. The companies “have stated that everyone is now providing such a notice,” according to the letter.
Politico was First report Wyden’s letter.
Wyden’s letter comes after a report last year by the inspector General, who unveiling That Trump’s management in 2017 and 2018 secretly received the Congress Call Records and text records and two home -serving lawmakers, imposing GAG orders on telephone companies receiving the requests. The secret surveillance requests were First revealed in 2021 He has targeted Adam Schiff, who was then the leading Democrat in the House Information Committee.
“The surveillance of the executive is a significant threat to the Senate’s independence and the fundamental principle of the separation of powers,” Wyden wrote in his letter. “If law enforcement officials, whether in federal, state or locally, can secretly obtain the location data of the senators or the stories of calls, our ability to perform our constitutional duties is seriously threatened.”
AT&T spokesman Alex Byers told TechCrunch in a statement that “we are complying with our obligations to the Senate’s sergeant” and that the telephone company “has not received legal claims on the Senate’s offices under the current contract, which began last June”.
When asked if AT&T received legal claims before the new contract, Byers did not respond.
Wyden told the letter that an anonymous carrier “confirmed that he was turned into the Senate in enforcement of the law without notifying the Senate”. When TechCrunch arrived, Wyden’s spokesman Keith Chu said the reason was that “we do not want to discourage companies to answer Sen. Wyden’s questions”.
Verizon and T-Mobile did not respond to a request for comments.
The letter also mentioned the Google Fi, US Mobile and Cellular Startup Cape carriers, which everyone has policies to alert “all customers to government demands whenever they are allowed to do so”. US Mobile and Cape adopted politics after a wyden office promoted.
Chu told TechCrunch that the Senate “has no contracts with the smaller carriers”.
Ahmed Khattak, founder and chief executive of the US Mobile, confirmed to TechCrunch that the company “did not have an official customer alert policy on surveillance before the investigation of Senator Wyden”.
“Our current policy is to alert customers to calls or legal requirements for information whenever we are allowed to do so and when the request is not subject to a court ruling, a legal gag or other legal restriction on disclosure,” Khattak said. “As far as we know, US Mobile has not received any surveillance request targeted by the senators or their staff.”
Cape Cape Cape John Doyle showed the company privacywhich states that the Cape responds to legal requests, but “will alert its subscribers to receive any legal procedure requesting disclosure about their accounts, thus giving you the opportunity to question this request”, unless it is legally prohibited from doing so. “To date, Cape has not received requests for subscriber data containing a non -dissemination obligation,” says the Privacy Policy.
Google did not respond to a request for comments.
As Wyden’s letter notes, after Congress introduced the protection in 2020 for the Senate data held by third -party companies, the Senate’s sergeant informed its contracts to require telephone bodies to send notifications of surveillance requests.
Wyden said his staff discovered that “these critical notifications were not happening”.
None of these protections apply to phones that are not officially issued to the Senate, such as the campaign or personal phones of the senators and their executives. In the letter, Wyden encouraged Senate colleagues to go to carriers now providing alerts.
Updated to include comments by John Doyle of Cape.
