Timing is everything!
Over the weekend, Reuters reported that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration ended a 15-year-old spying program almost immediately after Reuters and the New York Times discovered it. The program, run under the innocuously-titled “Special Operations Division,” had been collecting immense amounts of data from calls between the United States and targeted foreign countries.
The program was cut off in September 2013, just one month after Reuters broke the news of its existence.
The phone records obtained by the DEA were generally not used for national security purposes, but rather for ordinary criminal investigations, and were shared among numerous other agencies, including the FBI, IRS, and Homeland Security.
The original report detailed how DEA agents were taught to keep the program secret. In some instances, agents would feed state prosecutors tips on drug cases, but mislead them about the origin. Such behavior compromises the state’s case, since a faulty trail of the case’s origins violates the rights of the defendant.
One DEA agent compared the practice of covering their trail—dubbed “parallel construction”—to money laundering. “It’s just like laundering money – you work it backwards to make it clean.”
Although the program collected information on calls to and from specific foreign countries, the exact target countries have not yet been disclosed.
The Justice Department told Reuters they have since deleted all the program’s data.
Read more from Reuters.
