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

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. In the letter, Wyden, a Democrat and longstanding member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that an investigation by his staff found that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon were not notifying Senators of legal requests — including from the White House — to surveil their phones. The companies “have indicated that they are all now providing such notice,” according to the letter. Politico was first to report Wyden’s letter. 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. The ... Read full article.