SurveillanceThe many problems with the DEA's bulk phone records collection program

By Hanni Fakhoury

Think mass surveillance is just the wheelhouse of agencies like the NSA? Think again. One of the biggest concerns to come from the revelations about the NSA’s bulk collection of the phone records of millions of innocent Americans was that law enforcement agencies might be doing the same thing. It turns out this concern was valid, as last week the government let slip for the first time that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) had also been collecting the phone records of Americans in bulk since the 1990s.

From NSA to DEA
The government didn’t disclose this information in a report or in response to a congressional inquiry. Instead, it was quietly mentioned in a declaration by a DEA agent, in a criminal case brought in D.C. federal court. The defendant, Shantia Hassanshahi, is under indictment for allegedly conspiring to export electronic parts to Iran. The facts are important, as they highlight the problem with bulk collection.

An agent with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) received an unsolicited email from a source who claimed that an Iranian emailed him seeking to procure electronic parts for a project in Iran. The email to the source contained the Iranian’s phone number and business address in Tehran. The DHS agent took that phone number and queried it in a law enforcement database, seeking to find US based phone numbers that had communicated with the Iranian. The results turned up one number that corresponded to a Google voice phone number. Via a subpoena to Google, the government was able to identify the number as Hassanshahi’s. After additional investigation, including a search of the TECS database, the government indicted Hassanshahi. Assuming the database was the NSA’s controversial phone records database, Hassanshahi’s lawyers moved to suppress the information learned from the search of the database. The government responded that it wasn’t the NSA database and refused to give the court or the defendant any more information about the database—but asked the court to assume the information had been obtained unconstitutionally. That’s right—the government stated that the database it used was unconstitutional. Unsurprisingly, such an admission got a few raised eyebrows, including the judge overseeing the case, who noted that the government left him in a “difficult, and frustrating, situation.” The judge ordered the government to submit an ex parte declaration “summarizing the contours of the mysterious law enforcement database.”