Fed Drug Agency Faked Evidence and Kept Metadata on Americans

Today it was revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration kept a database of American phone records with no evidence of criminal activity. Before we get into that, I want to bring our readers up to speed on the chilling background to this story that should establish why the D.E.A. is a perfect storm of unethical behavior.

It was already revealed two years ago by Reuters that the Drug Enforcement Administration is covering up its relationship with the NSA by training federal agents to lie by inventing investigative trails in order to conceal leads they get from the NSA. They call it ‘retroactively recreating investigative trails.’ Isn’t that sweet? This means American citizens are already being accused and convicted of crimes based on secret and faked evidence. And remember, none of these cases involve terrorism.

And it goes without saying–the NSA’s metadata dragnet has never stopped a terrorism act. So what is it for? Controlling behavior.

Now, back to the recent revelations as reported by the New York Times:

The database, which was disclosed by the government in a court filing, “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,” it said.

It was one of several troves of information on Americans’ phone records revealed in recent years. The most controversial one is kept by the National Security Agency and contains records on every American phone call. Counterterrorism officials use it when conducting investigations…

Here’s what emptywheel, an expert in government surveillance, says:

I have long believed that the government put Iran on its list of approved target countries under the Section 215 dragnet not to use for counterterrorism purposes (the terror Iran seems to have sponsored of late is largely US generated), but instead to support sanctions. Yesterday, the government claimed it has been using a drug trafficking database (one described differently than Hemisphere) to support sanctions on Iran…At least that’s the implication of the declaration unsealed in the Shantia Hassanshahi case submitted in response to the judge’s order…

And they used it to go after sanctions violators, not drug traffickers. The declaration goes on to say that this database got shut down — at least, shut down under this authority — in September 2013.

But of course, the declaration doesn’t even say it was shut down…the declaration only says this stuff isn’t collected in bulk under 21 USC 876, not that it’s not being conducted in bulk. Maybe the government has finally moved its Iran sanction phone dragnet under Treasury sanctions authorities, where it should be?