Pubdate: Sat, 17 Jan 2015
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2015 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Author: Devlin Barrett

NEW REVELATIONS U.S. TRACKED AMERICANS' CALLS FOR OVER A DECADE

Justice Department Arm Collected Metadata on U.S. Calls to Foreign
Countries

The Justice Department secretly kept a database of Americans' calls
to foreign countries for more than a decade, according to a new court
filing and officials familiar with the program.

The revelation of another secret government database storing records
of Americans' calls came in a filing Thursday in the case of a man
accused of conspiring to unlawfully export electronic goods to Iran.

A Drug Enforcement Administration official said in the filing that the
agency, which is an arm of 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 court document only refers to collecting outgoing U.S. calls,
though people familiar with the program said it also collected data on
incoming calls.

The program didn't monitor the content of the calls.The document
doesn't identify the countries or say how many countries were
involved, though it acknowledges Iran was one of the countries. The
program began in the 1990s, say people familiar with its operation,
and was ended in August 2013 amid reports about the DEA gathering
phone records in other ways.

A Justice Department official said the database was deleted and
hasn't been searched since 2013, and said the DEA is no longer
collecting bulk phone records from U.S. phone companies.

Patrick Toomey, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said
the new disclosures show "the government has extended its use of
bulk collection far beyond" terror and national-security cases into
ordinary criminal investigations.

Last March, the then-head of the Senate Judiciary Committee raised
concerns with Attorney General Eric Holder in a private letter. In the
letter, made public Friday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) wrote: "I
am deeply concerned about this kind of suspicionless intrusion into
American's privacy in any context, but it is particularly troubling
when done for routine criminal investigations." He noted the
program has never been reviewed by any court, and no judge had ever
placed any controls on how and when the database was searched.

The court document is a sworn declaration by DEA Assistant Special
Agent in Charge Robert Patterson, which came in response to a
judge's demands for answers in the case of Shantia Hassanshahi, who
was arrested in 2013 in Los Angeles and is fighting the charge against
him. In his case, agents said they used the database to trace a
suspicious number in Iran to a phone linked to Mr.
Hassanshahi.

The database "could be used to query a telephone number where
federal law-enforcement officials had a reasonable articulable
suspicion that the telephone number at issue was related to an ongoing
federal criminal investigation," according to the court document.
The Iranian phone number at issue "was determined to meet this
standard based on specific information indicating that the Iranian
number was being used for the purpose of importing technological goods
to Iran in violation of United States law," Mr. Patterson said in
the declaration.

As described in the court papers, the DEA database sounds similar to
one kept by the National Security Agency, though the NSA gathers both
foreign and domestic calls. And the NSA program differs in another key
way: It is authorized and over seen by the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court. The DEA, according to the filing, gathered data
simply though administrative subpoenas that aren't reviewed by a
judge.

Civil liberties groups have called for an end to the NSA program,
saying it violates Americans' privacy. Courts are now weighing
several legal challenges to that program.

In court filings in Mr. Hassanshahi's case, his lawyer, Saied
Kashani, has sought to have the phone evidence suppressed, saying the
database "as described functions entirely like the NSA
database ... which is likely unconstitutional." After reading the new
filing, he said the government "has converted the war on drugs into
a war on privacy."

The lawyer said the DEA took a law originally meant to authorize
specific, targeted requests for information from drug companies and
turned it into a general sweep of millions of Americans' phone records.

"I think when Congress passed this statute they had no intention
that an agency would use it to generate these vast quantities of
information in a database on innocent Americans," Mr. Kashani
said.
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