US government may have been spying on citizens with AT&T, claims report

The US government has reportedly been spying on its citizens for years, with telecom carrier AT&T in on this program. According to a report in Wired, a lesser-known surveillance initiative, the Data Analytical Services (DAS) program has been used to track over a trillion domestic phone records annually within the United States. This program is said to have enabled federal, state, and local law enforcement to scrutinise the phone data of countless Americans, including non-suspects and victims, for more than a decade.

According to an internal memo obtained by Wired, the program known as DAS initially went by the name of Hemisphere. It partners with AT&T and uses its infrastructure to collect and analyse call records for various law enforcement agencies across the United States. DAS not only focuses on individuals who are in direct contact with criminal suspects but is also claimed to extend its scrutiny to anyone connected to these individuals.