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Wyden: AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon weren’t notifying senators of surveillance requests

Sen. Ron Wyden said in a letter that one U.S. phone carrier turned over Senate data to law enforcement without notifying the target.

Sen. Ron Wyden sent a letter to fellow Senators on Wednesday, revealing that three major U.S. cellphone carriers did not have provisions to notify lawmakers about government surveillance requests, despite a contractual requirement to do so. Wyden’s letter comes in the wake of a report last year by the Inspector General, which revealed that the Trump administration in 2017 and 2018 secretly obtained logs of calls and text messages of 43 congressional staffers and two serving House lawmakers, imposing gag orders on the phone companies that received the requests. “If law enforcement officials, whether at the federal, state, or even local level, can secretly obtain Senators’ location data or call histories, our ability to perform our constitutional duties is severely threatened.”

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