WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has formally acknowledged that it maintained a sweeping database of phone calls made from the United States to multiple foreign countries. The program has since been discontinued, the Justice Department said Friday.
The revelation was made in a court filing in the case of a man accused of conspiring to export goods illegally to Iran.
A DEA official wrote in a three-page document filed Thursday that the program used administrative subpoenas to collect records of calls originating in the U.S. to foreign countries, including Iran, that were “determined to have a demonstrated nexus to international drug trafficking and related criminal activities.”
The statement says the records kept track of the date, time and duration of the phone call between the initiating telephone number and the receiving telephone number.
The database could then 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.
A Justice Department statement said the program was discontinued in September 2013 and that all information held in the database has been deleted.
The program is separate from a National Security Agency phone records collection program that was exposed in 2013 by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden. But the existence of yet another electronic surveillance effort shows the extent to which the government viewed phone record collection as an important tool, despite objections of privacy groups.
“It’s a little bit unsurprising,” said Hanni Fakhouri, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “When one agency starts doing something, other agencies are going to look for ways to also do it” if they think it would be helpful to them.
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