Sen. Ron Wyden wrote to fellow senators Wednesday to reveal that three major US mobile airlines do not have provisions to notify lawmakers of government surveillance requests despite contractual requirements to do so.
In the letter, Wyden, a longtime Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Email Committee, said that investigations by his staff found that AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon had not notified senators from the White House of legal requests to monitor calls. The letter states that the companies “indicating that they are all providing such notices.”
Politico first reported Wyden’s letter.
Wyden’s letter was inspired by a report by an inspector last year. This revealed that in 2017 and 2018 the Trump administration secretly obtained logs of calls and text messages for 43 Congressional staff and two service lawmakers, imposing gag orders on the phone companies that received the request. The request for secret surveillance was first revealed in 2021 for targeting Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
“Overview of the enforcement division poses a major threat to the fundamental principles of Senate independence and separation of power,” Wyden wrote in his letter. “If law enforcement officials are able to secretly obtain and call history of senator location data, or call history, at the federal, state or local level, their ability to fulfill their constitutional duties is seriously threatened.”
AT&T spokesman Alex Byers told TechCrunch “We are complying with our senator’s obligations to sergeants,” and the telephone company “is not subject to legal requirements regarding the Senate office under the current contract that began last June.”
When asked if AT&T had received a legal request prior to the new contract, Byers did not respond.
In a letter, Wyden said that the carrier of one name “confirmed that it handed over Senate data to law enforcement.” When they reached TechCrunch, Wyden spokesman Keith Chew said the reason was “we don’t want businesses to discourage Senator Wyden from responding to questions.”
Verizon and T-Mobile did not respond to requests for comment.
The letter also mentions Carriers Google FI, US Mobile, and the Cellular Startup Cape. All of these have a policy that notifies “all customers of government requests whenever they are permitted to do so.” US Mobile and Cape adopted this policy after outreach from Wyden’s office.
Chu told TechCrunch that the Senate “does not have contracts with small airlines.”
US Mobile spokesman Ahmed Katak confirmed with TechCrunch that the company “did not have a formal customer notification policy on surveillance requests prior to the investigation of Senator Wyden.”
“Our current policy is to notify the client of a legal request for subpoena or information, where legally permitted and if the request is not subject to a court order, legal gag provision, or other legal restrictions on disclosure,” Khattak said. “To our knowledge, US Mobile has not received surveillance requests targeting calls from senators or their staff.”
Google and Cape did not respond to requests for comment.
As Wyden’s letter noted, after Congress protected Senate data held by third-party companies in 2020, Senate Sergeant of ARMS renewed the contract to request a telephone person to send notifications of surveillance requests.
Wyden said his staff discovered “none of these important notices have happened.”
These protections do not apply to phones that are not officially issued to the Senate, such as campaigns for Senators and their staff or personal mobile phones. In the letter, Wyden encouraged his Senate colleagues to switch to the airline that is currently offering notifications.