New Revelations U.S. Tracked Americans’ Calls for Over a Decade
Justice Department Arm Collected Metadata on U.S. Calls to Foreign Countries

By DEVLIN BARRETT
Updated Jan. 16, 2015 2:39 p.m. ET
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WASHINGTON—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 and from 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 to foreign countries, although people familiar with the program said it also collected data about incoming 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, according to people familiar with its operation, and was shut down 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 telephone 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” the realm of terrorism and national-security cases, into ordinary criminal investigations.

The head of the DEA, Michele Leonhart, was pressed about the program at a congressional hearing last year, where the Senate Judiciary Committee’s then-Chairman Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) spoke only in general terms about his concerns.

Ms. Leonhart told lawmakers, “We have had oversight of those programs since 1992, and we will work with you…We welcome a look at what we’ve been doing.’’

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 phone 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 wrote in the declaration.

As described in the court papers, the DEA database sounds similar in some respects to one kept by the National Security Agency, though the NSA gathers both foreign and domestic calls. And the NSA program is different in another key respect: It is authorized and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The DEA database, according to the court filing, is collected simply on the basis of administrative subpoenas, which 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 reviewing the new court filing, Mr. Kashani 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.

Write to Devlin Barrett at devlin.barrett@wsj.com