For decades, the government has used the Third Party Doctrine to obtain massive amounts of phone records without a warrant.

Even prior to the creation of the Third Party Doctrine by the Supreme Court in 1979, government agencies were obtaining phone records using pen register requests that provided them with info on numbers called and the length of the calls. This method, however, required the government to supply some information of its own: specifically, a targeted source phone number phone companies could use to search for call metadata.

Ron Wyden Wants To Know Why The DEA Still Has On-Demand Access To Trillions Of Phone Records