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Human Rights Watch Sues DEA over Bulk Data Collection

posted by takyon on Thursday April 09 2015, @11:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the drug-war-still-a-thing dept.

NotSanguine writes:

Reuters is reporting on a lawsuit filed against the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) by Human Rights Watch. The lawsuit, filed on April 7, 2015, seeks to have the DEA's bulk collection program [autoplay video, exclusive report by USA TODAY] declared unlawful.

From the Reuters article:

Opening another front in the legal challenges to U.S. government surveillance, a human rights group has sued the Drug Enforcement Administration for collecting bulk records of Americans' telephone calls to some foreign countries.

Lawyers for Human Rights Watch filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. The lawsuit asks a judge to declare unlawful the DEA program, which ended in September 2013 after about 15 years, and to bar the DEA from collecting call records in bulk again.

U.S. spying programs have come under court scrutiny since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of them in 2013.

Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said on Wednesday the DEA program is not active.

"All of the information has been deleted," he said in an email to Reuters. "The agency is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers."

The DEA's Special Operations Division collected data in bulk about international calls from the United States to certain countries determined by the government to have a nexus to drug trafficking.

The data included phone numbers and the date, time and duration of each call, but not the content, according to the DEA.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Thursday April 09 2015, @12:05PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday April 09 2015, @12:05PM (#168284) Journal

    It should be noted that Human Rights Watch isn't just suing over the illegality of the program, it also wants to confirm that records have been deleted:

    Although the DEA has indicated the program was “suspended” in 2013, this suit seeks to ensure the program is permanently terminated, that it cannot restart, and that all of Human Rights Watch’s illegally collected records have been purged from all government systems.

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  • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday April 09 2015, @06:29PM

    by davester666 (155) on Thursday April 09 2015, @06:29PM (#168436)

    Sure. no problem. not like any other agency has the budget to have a copy of the entire database.

    Our department has stopped doing this and have delete the data under our control is not the same as nobody in the US gov't is doing this and the data no longer exits.