DEA Phone Tracking Program Would Have Continued If Not For Snowden
from the thank-you-snowden dept
We already covered the fact that the DEA had a phone tracking program similar to the NSA's that we've been debating. As we noted in our post, that DEA phone tracking program was actually revealed years ago in a NY Times report, though it didn't get that much attention at the time. Yesterday, USA Today's Brad Heath did a much more detailed report on the details of the program -- including how massive it was, how little oversight there was (basically none) and how widely it was used (all the time). But there was one element that seemed important enough to call out separately: this program has been ended and it's entirely because of Ed Snowden. While there's still a fight going on over whether or not the NSA program will continue after June 1st (when Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act expires), Heath's reporting notes that the DOJ realized the DEA program could not continue -- once it realized how similar it was to the NSA program:Holder pulled the plug on the phone data collection in September 2013.Think about this, though: the program lasted for more than two decades before anyone bothered to even consider this idea. And it was only once the other database (which actually had a lot more strict access controls) started getting negative press that Justice Department officials realized they had no real legal basis for the DEA program.
That summer, Snowden leaked a remarkable series of classified documents detailing some of the government's most prized surveillance secrets, including the NSA's logging of domestic phone calls and Internet traffic. Reuters and The New York Times raised questions about the drug agency's own access to phone records.
Officials said the Justice Department told the DEA that it had determined it could not continue both surveillance programs, particularly because part of its justification for sweeping NSA surveillance was that it served national security interests, not ordinary policing. Eight months after USTO was halted, for example, department lawyers defended the spy agency's phone dragnet in court partly on the grounds that it "serves special governmental needs above and beyond normal law enforcement."
Three months after USTO was shut down, a review panel commissioned by President Obama urged Congress to bar the NSA from gathering telephone data on Americans in bulk. Not long after that, Obama instructed the NSA to get permission from the surveillance court before querying its phone data collection, a step the drug agency never was required to take.
The DEA stopped searching USTO in September 2013. Not long after that, it purged the database.
"It was made abundantly clear that they couldn't defend both programs," a former Justice Department official said. Others said Holder's message was more direct. "He said he didn't think we should have that information," a former DEA official said.
Who, again, is watching the watchers? While some have argued that Snowden's revelations have not (yet) resulted in the NSA's surveillance programs being stopped, it seems pretty clear that he was directly responsible for this DEA program being shut down completely and the data purged.
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Filed Under: dea, ed snowden, eric holder, metadata, phone calls, surveillance, usto
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I think that'll be my toast at the bar tonight.
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Parallel Construction
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"some have argued"???
Maybe this sheds light on Masnicking, the inability to communicate concisely (he claims to be an Ivy League "economist", you know):
Wally's Hobby Is Economic Babble Talk
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-03-26
Here's some actual numbers that put Snowden in perspective:
http://cryptome.org/2013/11/snowden-tally.htm
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Re: "some have argued"???
Why the scare quotes? And do you have a reference for that fact?
(he claims to be an Ivy League "economist", you know)
When did he claim that? I remember mentioning that he had an economics degree and he corrected me and said, IIRC, his degree is in business.
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Re:
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Re: Re:
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I'll believe that last part when pigs fly out of my butt.
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Re:
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Re: Re:
Yes we purged the data. they may say. From one disk or set. What about the others? And don't tell me they don't have backups somewhere.
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Re:
It's not like they'd be losing anything valuable anyways. They can't use any of the information in court, it can only be used against them in court. What little there is that's actually valuable would be backed up elsewhere in the "official" investigations.
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Edward Snowden and the NSA..
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Re: Edward Snowden and the NSA..
Never mind that he'll be accused under the Espionage Act and not even be permitted to argue to the jury that what he did was right. Never mind that the U.S. has a history of throwing whistleblowers like Kiriakou and Manning into jail and using torture on them for fun. Never mind that the U.S. does not bother prosecuting Holder, Clapper, and other cronies even for perjury before Congress, and the hoi polloi are apparently fine with that. Never mind that the Constitutional violations continue unabatedly. Never mind that Snowden continues raising political awareness actively, something he won't be doing once he is locked up for life by a kangaroo court after a Soviet style show trial.
The hoi polloi still believe that they should not listen to Snowden as long as he does not come into a hostile U.S.A. not interested in its Constitution or due process. And once he does come, he will be shut up, so there will be no more opportunity for the hoi polloi to listen.
No need to ever start thinking either way.
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Re: Re: Edward Snowden and the NSA..
Maybe things have changed, but the last set of polls I saw about this indicated that about half of the unwashed population believes that Snowden should return.
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Re: Re: Re: Edward Snowden and the NSA..
Disproportional power and all that?
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Re: Re: Re: Edward Snowden and the NSA..
He should be commended.
He should be granted immunity to any charges that happened after he fled the US.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Edward Snowden and the NSA..
The irony is that this country was founded by "traitors".
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Apr 8th, 2015 @ 12:38pm
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Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Apr 8th, 2015 @ 12:38pm
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RICO
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How convenient for DEA
The bad guys are not stupid, they keep up on tech:
Management hates looking bad:
Not sure what changed. Oh, the minor change is the DEA gets to focus on its job, not play 007.
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really stopped?
http://www.ktvl.com/shared/news/top-stories/stories/ktvl_vid_15761.shtml
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Re: really stopped?
There are other programs they can use for things like that. Stingrays, for example.
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So the DEA used to have their own copy of a mass surveillance database, but now they have to use the NSA's copy instead. I'm 99.8% sure that is what's happening.
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telecom retroactive immunity
Or is there an opening here for civil suits against telecoms for assisting the DEA?
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Re: telecom retroactive immunity
it's the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008.
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SOP
Well, methinks we should not be jumping to unproved conclusions here just yet, or doing a happy dance "cuz the good guys won one".
Normal procedure in these cases is to simply start up the exact same process under a new agency name with more secrecy and less over-sight and transfer the held data to the new site before purging the old machines.
Standard Operational Procedure actually.
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