DEA Stopped Bulk Telephone Records Collection, Destroyed Database, EFF Says

The Drug Enforcement Administration stopped collecting bulk telephony records of Americans making calls overseas and destroyed "the only bulk database of those records," the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post Monday. EFF staff attorney Mark Rumold said that EFF and its client, Human Rights Watch, confirmed the DEA practice was stopped and the records destruction occurred. He said DEA "secretly and illegally collected billions of records" from the 1990s to 2013. In April, EFF filed a lawsuit on behalf of HRW, which challenged the DEA program's constitutionality. HRW voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit after it received "assurances from the government, provided under penalty of perjury, that the bulk collection has ceased and that the only database containing the billions of Americans’ call records collected by the DEA has been purged from the government’s possession," Rumold said. He said the assurances were provided after a federal judge ordered the government to respond to HRW's questions -- "the first instance we know of in which a plaintiff challenging a mass surveillance program was allowed to take discovery." The government retains some illegally collected records, "and they've admitted as much," Rumold said. And the government still collects phone records in bulk through an NSA program and a similar DEA one, he added. DEA didn't comment.