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 secret surveillance requests were first revealed in 2021 to have targeted Adam Schiff, who was at the time the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
“Executive branch surveillance poses a significant threat to the Senate’s independence and the foundational principle of separation of powers,” wrote Wyden in his letter. “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.”
AT&T spokesperson Alex Byers told TechCrunch in a statement that, “we are complying with our obligations to the Senate Sergeant at Arms,” and that the phone company has “received no legal demands regarding Senate offices under the current contract, which began last June.”
When asked whether AT&T received legal demands before the new contract, Byers did not respond.
Wyden said in the letter that one unnamed carrier “confirmed that it turned over Senate data to law enforcement without notifying the Senate.” When reached by TechCrunch, Wyden’s spokesperson Keith Chu said the reason was that, “we don’t want to discourage companies from responding to Sen. Wyden’s questions.”
Verizon and T-Mobile did not respond to a request for comment.
The letter also mentioned carriers Google Fi, US Mobile, and cellular startup Cape, which all have policies to notify “all customers about government demands whenever they are allowed to do so.” US Mobile and Cape adopted the policy after outreach from Wyden’s office.
Chu told TechCrunch that the Senate “doesn’t have contracts with the smaller carriers.”
Ahmed Khattak, a spokesperson for US Mobile, confirmed to TechCrunch that the company “did not have a formal customer notification policy regarding surveillance requests prior to Senator Wyden’s inquiry.”
“Our current policy is to notify customers of subpoenas or legal demands for information whenever we are legally permitted to do so and when the request is not subject to a court order, statutory gag provision, or other legal restriction on disclosure,” said Khattak. “To the best of our knowledge, US Mobile has not received any surveillance requests targeting the phones of Senators or their staff.”
Google and Cape did not respond to a request for comment.
As Wyden’s letter notes, after Congress enacted protections in 2020 for Senate data held by third party companies, the Senate Sergeant at Arms updated its contracts to require phone carriers to send notifications of surveillance requests.
Wyden said that his staff discovered that “these crucial notifications were not happening.”
None of these protections apply to phones that are not officially issued to the Senate, such as campaign or personal phones of Senators and their staffers. In the letter, Wyden encouraged his Senate colleagues to switch to carriers that now provide notifications.
