Sen Ron Widen on Wednesday sent a letter to fellow senators, which revealed that the three major American cellphone carriers had no provisions to inform MPs about government monitoring requests, despite the constitutional requirement of doing so.
In the letter, a democrats of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a long-time member, Wayden said that an investigation by his employees found that AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon were not informing the senators of legal requests-to survey the White House-Your Phones. Companies “indicated that they are now providing such notices,” according to the letter.
Politico was first to report Viden's letter.
Widen's letter came in view of a report last year by Inspector General, which revealed that in 2017 and 2018, the Trump administration secretly received logs of calls and text messages of 43 Congress employees and two serving house MPs, which put gag orders on phone companies receiving requests. The secret monitoring requests were first surfaced in 2021 to target Adam Shif, who was the top democrats in the House Intelligence Committee at that time.
“Executive branch monitoring is an important threat to the founding theory of the independence of the Senate and the separation of the powers,” Wrned in his letter. “Our ability to perform constitutional duties is seriously threatened if the law enforcement officer, whether federal, state, or even at the local level, can secretly obtain data or call hyster.”
AT&T spokesperson Alex Buyers told Tekkrunch in a statement that “we are following our obligations for the Senate Sergeant,” and the phone company has not received any legal demand about the Senate offices under the current contract, which started in June last June. “
Asked whether AT&T has received legal demand before the new contract, buyers did not respond.
Widen said in the letter that an anonymous carrier “converted the senate data into law enforcement without informing the Senate.” On arrival by Techcrunch, Wyden spokesman Keith Chu said that the reason was, “We do not want to discourage companies by answering Sen Viden's questions.”
Verizon and T-Mobile did not respond to the remarks request.
The letter also mentions carrier Google Fi, US mobile and cellular startup cape, with all policies of all that “are to inform all customers to inform the government's demands, whenever they are allowed to do so.” The US Mobile and Cape adopted the policy after outreach from Widen's office.
Chu told Techcrunch that “there is no contract with a small carrier in the Senate.”
US Mobile founder and CEO Ahmed Khattak confirmed Techchchan that the company “did not have a formal customer notification policy about monitoring requests before the investigation of Senator Widen.”
Khattak said, “Our current policy, whenever we are legally allowed to do so and when the request is not subject to the court's order, the statutory gag provision, or other legal restrictions on disclosure, the subponus or legal demands have to be informed for information.” “To do the best of our knowledge, we have not received any monitoring requests targeting the mobile of the mobiles or their employees.”
Cape CEO John Doyle pointed to the company's confidentiality policy, stating that Cape responds to legal requests, but “will inform your customers to achieve any legal process seeking disclosure related to your accounts, which gives you an opportunity to challenge the request,” until it is prohibited to do so. “To date, the cape has not received any request for subscriber data that had a non -predominance obligation,” it is written in privacy policy.
Google did not respond to the remarks request.
As Viden's letter notes, the Congress earned security for the senate data of the Senate in 2020 in 2020, the Senate Sergeant updated its contracts, so that the phone carrier was required to send information about monitoring requests.
Wayden said his employees found that “these important information was not being done.”
None of these security applies to phones that are officially released to the Senate, such as expeditions or individual phones of senators and their employees. In the letter, Wayden encouraged his Senate colleagues to switch to the carrier that now provide information.
Updated to include comment from John Doyle of Cape and corrected the title of the founder of US Mobile,
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