USA Today has done an investigation revealing that since 1992, The Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration harvested telephone logs for almost all calls from the U.S. to other countries.
At least 116 other countries.
The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA's intelligence arm, was the government's first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans' privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.
More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified.
As
techdirt.com points out:
The report also shows how the DEA got this info from telcos using the simple process of an administrative subpoena, so there was no court review. Telcos could have protested and gone to court, but the DOJ urged them not to do so.
Both Republican and Democratic administrations are guilty (as they still are today) of these
sweeping civil liberty violations.
The data collection began in 1992 during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, nine years before his son, President George W. Bush, authorized the NSA to gather its own logs of Americans' phone calls in 2001. It was approved by top Justice Department officials in four presidential administrations and detailed in occasional briefings to members of Congress but otherwise had little independent oversight, according to officials involved with running it.
The DEA used its data collection extensively and in ways that the NSA is now prohibited from doing. Agents gathered the records without court approval, searched them more often in a day than the spy agency does in a year and automatically linked the numbers the agency gathered to large electronic collections of investigative reports, domestic call records accumulated by its agents and intelligence data from overseas.
Whether it's
called "terrorism" or "the war on drugs", the excuses for mass surveillance are the same—the information is an
important, nay an
essential tool in combating the bogeyman. Yet the only terrorism we have stopped has been terror plots manufactured by
our bloated security apparatus. The pre-9/11 surveillance program was more widely used and the attacks in September did not appear to have been hindered at all.
The DEA's program ended in September of 2013 (Snowden happened that summer) and then:
The DEA asked the Justice Department to restart the surveillance program in December 2013. It withdrew that request when agents came up with a new solution. Every day, the agency assembles a list of the telephone numbers its agents suspect may be tied to drug trafficking. Each day, it sends electronic subpoenas — sometimes listing more than a thousand numbers — to telephone companies seeking logs of international telephone calls linked to those numbers, two official familiar with the program said.
The data collection that results is more targeted but slower and more expensive. Agents said it takes a day or more to pull together communication profiles that used to take minutes.
There is no explanation on why this might be "slower" or "more expensive." But, even if that is true, maybe having a little more liberty is worth the cost.