Wired published an article last year that highlighted a program run by the federal government that has kept records of phone calls made within the country. The article was prompted by a copy of a letter obtained by Wired from Senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice complaining about the program.
The program is called the Data Analytical Services (DAS) and has been available for over a decade for local and federal law enforcement to obtain calling records without needing a subpoena. This program has one added advantage is that it stores older call records. Historically, telephone companies have not kept call records more than two years.
The program is operated in conjunction with AT&T, which is the natural partner since a huge percentage of calls pass through the AT&T network at some point. AT&T owns the vast majority of tandem switches, which are the regional switches used to route both landline and cellular calls. It turns out that most companies that use voice over IP also eventually dump the calls somewhere into the public switched telephone network (PSTN), so these calls are also likely mostly captured by AT&T.
As Wired points out, there is no federal law requiring AT&T to record and store call records, and it seems like it is being done by the company as a money-making venture. What’s interesting about this effort is that it appears to be fully out of compliance with earlier court orders pertaining to telephone records captured and stored as a result of the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act allowed the government to gather large amounts of data from citizens in the aftermath of September 11 and the anthrax attacks in 2001.
However, some of the provisions of the Patriot Act expired. Lawsuits brought by the ACLU forced the NSA to begin deleting phone records in 2018. At the time, the agency said it was deleting over 600 million phone records that were improperly collected. Apparently, the NSA would gather huge amounts of calls that were tangentially related to somebody of interest that were obtained under a warrant. The ACLU ended up suing the NSA almost immediately after the agreement since the agency did not cease the practices that has invited the suit.
The DAS program was originally known as Hemisphere. The New York Times disclosed the existence of the program in 2013. Following the public disclosure, President Barack Obama ordered the suspension of the program and cut off funding. But it seems that the program was renamed to DAS and was instead funded by various law enforcement agencies rather than directly by the federal government. Both the Trump and Biden administration have resumed funding for the program.
To be clear, the data collected with DAS is not wiretapping, which fully records a call. Wiretapping requires obtaining a subpoena, but getting data from DAS does not. Instead, the DAS program records the calling and called parties, and AT&T can apparently run sophisticated software that will show patterns for everybody associated with somebody of interest to law enforcement, including friends and family.