Brad Heath, at USA Today, reports on a DEA program to collect, in bulk, phone records of American calls going to designated foreign nations. The program started in 1992 under George H. W. Bush, and continued until 2013.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans' international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.
For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.
U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades, USA Today
The program was initially focused on calls to Colombia, but grew to include a large number of nations.
DEA officials reportedly focused their collection efforts on communications between Americans and people in more than 116 foreign countries considered suspect, with an emphasis on Canada, Mexico and other Latin American countries.
DEA program secretly collected bulk phone records for decades, The Hill
The collection effort gathered most all call records from the United States to the countries, without court review.
The program was halted after the Edward Snowden revelations, because it got in the way of national security arguments used to justify NSA electronic spying on Americans.
Officials said the Justice Department told the DEA that it had determined it could not continue both surveillance programs, particularly because part of its justification for sweeping NSA surveillance was that it served national security interests, not ordinary policing. Eight months after USTO was halted, for example, department lawyers defended the spy agency's phone dragnet in court partly on the grounds that it "serves special governmental needs above and beyond normal law enforcement."
U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades, USA Today
In a statement sent to Ars, Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote:
The government has repeatedly tried to justify its spying activities on national-security grounds, but it turns out it was doing much the same thing for years in aid of ordinary criminal investigations. During that time, the government hid its use of bulk collection from the public, from courts, and from criminal defendants. In doing so, the government short-circuited any debate about the legality and wisdom of putting the call records of millions of innocent people in the hands of the DEA. This pattern of extreme executive secrecy must come to an end.
If you called anyone overseas from 1992-2013, the DEA probably knew about it, Ars Technica
Sparse details of the program had come to light from court documents this January, and USA Today has apparently been investigating the program since then.
The program was kept secret by laundering information discovered, keeping it away from court review.
To keep the program secret, the DEA sought not to use the information as evidence in criminal prosecutions or in its justification for warrants or other searches. Instead, its Special Operations Division passed the data to field agents as tips to help them find new targets or focus existing investigations, a process approved by Justice Department lawyers. Many of those tips were classified because the DEA phone searches drew on other intelligence data.
That practice sparked a furor when the Reuters news agency reported in 2013 that the DEA trained agents to conceal the sources of those tips from judges and defense lawyers.
U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades, USA Today
Some foreign governments were informed of the program, in case the program got exposed.
But the effort to keep a large-scale electronic spying program on Americans secret, across two decades, has clearly been successful, at least up until now.