I mean, I knew that there was mass surveillance occurring, but to this extent... perhaps I needed a refresher on just how much warrantless data is being collected on the citizens of the United States.

The DEA has warrantless access to with no judicial oversight under "administrative subpoenas" originated by the DEA. The DEA pays AT&T to maintain employees throughout the country devoted to investigating call records through this database for the DEA. The database grows by 4 billion records per day, and presumably covers all traffic that crosses AT&T's network. Internal directives instructed participants never to reveal the project publicly.

Information that is legally collectible according to 2014 pen trap laws includes:

Phone

  * Dialed numbers
  * Received call numbers
  * The time the call was made
  * Whether the call was answered, or went to voice-mail
  * The length of each call
  * Content of SMS text messages
  * The real-time location of a cell phone to within a few meters

Email

  * All email header information other than the subject line
  * The email addresses of the people to whom an email was sent
  * The email addresses of people whom received the email
  * The time each email is sent or received
  * The size of each email that is sent or received

Internet

  * IP address, port, and protocol used
  * The IP address of other computers on the Internet that information was exchanged with
  * Time-stamp and size information of Internet access
  * Protocol traffic analysis to obtain URL web addresses surfed on the web, emails posted or read, instant messages exchanged, and information posted onto message boards

The last one is particularly damning. Interesting that no warrant is needed for any of this.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-p...

[2] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013...

---

Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.

Administrative subpoena authorities allow executive branch agencies to issue a compulsory request for documents or testimony without prior approval from a grand jury, court, or other judicial entity.

---

Planting AT&T employees and deeply embedding them within the government like that, utilizing "administrative subpoena's" that require no grand jury OR judge (just the DEA themselves) is, in my personal opinion, a breach of my 4th amendment right.