DEA GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE DRAGNET EXPOSED; ACCESS TO DATA LIKELY CONTINUES
Secret mass surveillance conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration is falling under renewed scrutiny after fresh revelations about the broad scope of the agency’s electronic spying.
On Tuesday, USA Today reported that for more than two decades, dating back to 1992, the DEA and the Justice Department “amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking.”
Citing anonymous current and former officials “involved with the operation,” USA Today reported that Americans’ calls were logged between the United States and targeted countries and regions including Canada, Mexico, and Central and South America.
The DEA’s data dragnet was apparently shut down by attorney general Eric Holder in September 2013. But on Wednesday, following USA Today‘s report, Human Rights Watch launched a lawsuit against the DEA over its bulk collection of phone records and is seeking a retrospective declaration that the surveillance was unlawful.
The latest revelations shine more light on the broad scope of the DEA’s involvement in mass surveillance programs, which can be traced back to a secret program named “Project Crisscross” in the early 1990s, as The Intercept previously revealed.
Documents from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden,published by The Intercept in August last year, showed that the DEA was involved in collecting and sharing billions of phone records alongside agencies such as the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI.
The vast program reported on by USA Today shares some of the same hallmarks of Project Crisscross: it began in the early 1990s, was ostensibly aimed at gathering intelligence about drug trafficking, and targeted countries worldwide, with focus on Central and South America.
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