"Wyden: AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon weren’t notifying senators of surveillance requests" 21 May 2025

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...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...

...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...

...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...

...Ahmed Khattak, US Mobile’s founder and CEO, 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.”..

...Cape CEO John Doyle pointed to the company’s privacy policy, which states that Cape responds to legal requests but “will notify its subscribers of receipt of any legal process seeking disclosure related to their accounts, thereby giving you the opportunity to challenge that request,” unless legally prohibited to do so. “To date, Cape has not received any requests for subscriber data that contained a nondisclosure obligation,” the privacy policy reads.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.