DEA secretly tracked Americans’ calls for over a decade, document reveals
DEA secretly tracked Americans’ calls for over a decade,
document reveals
By Kellan Howell - The Washington Times - Saturday,
January 17, 2015
A new document reveals that the U.S. Department of
Justice secretly kept track of Americans’ calls to foreign countries for more
than a decade to track drug trafficking and other criminal activities.
The new database of stored calls was described in a filing
Thursday in the case of a man accused of conspiring to unlawfully export goods
to Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
A Drug Enforcement Administration official said in the
filing that the agency, which operates under the Justice Department, has long
used administrative subpoenas — not federal court orders — to collect the
metadata of U.S. calls to foreign countries “that were determined to have a
demonstrated nexus to international drug trafficking and related criminal
activities,” the Journal reported.
Although the court document only refers to outgoing
calls, sources familiar with the program say it also collected data on incoming
calls.
However, the program did not monitor the content of the
conversations. The document did not identify the countries called or say how
many countries were involved, but did mention Iran as one of the countries
reached.
The program operated from 1990 until 2013, sources told
The Journal, and the Justice Department said the database was deleted and has
not been searched since 2013.
The database controlled by the DEA is reminiscent of one
kept by the National Security Agency, but the NSA gathers both foreign and
domestic calls and is authorized and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court as opposed to the DEA program which merely issued
administrative subpoenas that weren’t reviewed by a judge.
The latest discovery shows the government has “extended
its use of bulk collection far beyond” terror and national security cases to
ordinary criminal investigations, American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Patrick
Toomey told The Journal.
Civil Liberties groups and lawmakers have called for an
end to the program, saying it violates Americans’ privacy rights and courts are
now weighing legal challenges to the program.
Saied Kashani, the lawyer in this case, has sought to
have the phone evidence thrown out and said the government has “converted the
war on drugs into a war on privacy,” The Journal reported.
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