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Sen. Ron Wyden is worried that several of America’s largest phone companies are ill-suited to prevent the Trump administration from spying on senators, and the Oregon Democrat is warning his colleagues to take precautions.
On Wednesday, Wyden sent a letter to fellow senators in which he claimed that major carriers have failed to set up protocols to give the lawmakers proper notice about surveillance requests. He wrote:
Our Senate communications face serious cyber and surveillance risks, directly threatening the Senate’s independence and the separation of powers. An investigation by my staff revealed that until recently, Senators have been kept in the dark about executive branch surveillance of Senate phones, because the three major phone carriers — AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile — failed to establish systems to notify offices about surveillance requests, as required by their Senate contracts.
Wyden’s letter says that in response to his concerns, the issue has been addressed with the senators’ publicly funded phones, but he added that more needs to be done to protect their personal phones from such surveillance. The Democrat also cited a report from the Justice Department’s inspector general last year that raised concerns about the DOJ’s dogged — and ultimately successful — efforts to obtain phone records of dozens of congressional employees and two lawmakers as part of a rabid leak investigation during Trump’s first term.
Wyden wrote:
While now rectified for Senate-funded lines, significant gaps remain, especially for the campaign and personal phones used by most Senators. I urge your support for legislative changes to allow the Sergeant at Arms (SAA) to protect Senators’ phones and accounts from cyber threats, both foreign and domestic. I also urge you to consider switching your campaign and personal phone lines to other carriers that will provide notice of government surveillance.
“Executive branch surveillance poses a significant threat to the Senate’s independence and the foundational principle of separation of powers,” the senator warned, adding: “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.”
Wyden also referred to the Salt Typhoon cyberattack, which was launched out of China and targeted top U.S. officials, as evidence that the surveillance threat isn’t limited to the Trump administration.
When Politico broke the news of Wyden’s letter, AT&T and Verizon both defended their approach:
“We are complying with our obligations to the Senate Sergeant at Arms,” said AT&T spokesperson Alex Byers in a statement. “We have received no legal demands regarding Senate offices under the current contract, which began last June.”
Said Verizon spokesperson Richard Young in a statement, “We respect the Senator’s view that providers should give notice to Senators if we receive legal process regarding their use of their personal devices, but disagree with his policy position.”
In a statement to MSNBC, T-Mobile said:
We comply with our contractual obligations and the law, and we provide information to the government only in response to a valid legal demand.
Wyden’s letter comes amid growing concerns about the Trump administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department. The DOJ’s recent move to weaken rules designed to protect journalists from leak investigations has sparked worries about the administration’s ability to target journalists and their sources. And the department’s dubious criminal prosecution of Rep. Monica McIver, D-N.J., over an incident rooted in her attempt to oversee an immigrant detention facility, shows that the administration feels free to target members of Congress with law enforcement activity rooted in politics.