The U.S. Department of Justice secretly maintained a sweeping database of phone calls made from the United States to multiple foreign countries for more than a decade, according to new documents.
The database, which kept track of the date, time and duration of the phone call between the initiating telephone number and the receiving telephone number from 1990 until 2013, was stored to keep track of drug trafficking and other criminal activities, the Drug Enforcement Administration admitted on Friday, claiming that the program has since been deleted and discontinued.
The revelation was made in a three-page court filing on Thursday in the case of a man accused of conspiring to export goods and technology illegally to Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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.
Since years, the DEA has relied on 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 both outgoing and incoming calls were collected, the program did not monitor the content of the conversations, according to court documents, which did not identify the countries involved, but did mention Iran as one of the countries reached, according to The Washington Times.
Then, the database could be used to query a specific telephone number if law enforcement officials "had a reasonable articulable suspicion that the telephone number was related to an ongoing federal criminal investigation," according to a declaration by Robert Patterson, a DEA assistant special agent in charge.
In March, Sen. Patrick Leahy, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had informed Attorney General Eric Holder that the program was using intrusive and discriminate methods to collect "enormous number of records" as part of routine drug investigations, according to a letter made public on Friday.
"The fact that the DEA has been engaged in similar bulk collection of records from service providers about calls between the United States and many other countries, and has been doing so without judicial review or independent oversight, is of great concern," Leahy, D-Vt., wrote in the letter.
Meanwhile Toomey said the disclosure "underscores how the government has extended its use of bulk collection far beyond the NSA and the national security context, and into ordinary criminal investigations," Fox News reported.
"It also shows yet again how the government has used strained legal theories to justify the surveillance of millions of innocent Americans under laws that were never written for that purpose," he added.
