Snowden’s Leaks Forced the DEA To End Its Own Mass Surveillance Program
By exposing the NSA’s spying programs, fugitive leaker Edward Snowden forced the Justice Department to shut down a separate phone-surveillance operation.
2:13 PM ET
By Dustin Volz
National Journal
It has been a pretty good week for Edward Snowden.
The polarizing leaker of government secrets rocketed back into public awareness, thanks to an interview with viral-hit-maker and comedian-with-a-conscience John Oliver. Then Snowden enthusiasts installed a bust of him in a Brooklyn park—which was later replaced with a hologram of his likeness. And actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt is traipsing around Washington, D.C., filming scenes as Snowden for the Oliver Stone movie about the fugitive slated for release later this year.
But likely nothing will bring the former National Security Agency contractor as much satisfaction as finding out this week that his 2013 disclosures appear to have prompted the Justice Department to pull the plug on a secret mass-surveillance program—one he isn’t even responsible for exposing.
USA Today reported on Tuesday that a Justice Department program had, from 1992 to 2013, collected records of Americans’ international phone calls. Described as a “blueprint” for the NSA’s controversial dragnet, the program, housed within the Drug Enforcement Administration, “amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking,” according to the paper. Those countries included U.S. neighbors Canada and Mexico, as well as parts of Europe and nearly all of central and South America.
The DEA surveillance net was remarkably similar to the NSA program. It collected in bulk the phone metadata—that is, the numbers, time-stamps, and duration of a call but not its content—of all U.S. calls placed to targeted foreign countries. Unlike the NSA, the DEA dragnet did not include wholly domestic calls, but it did appear to lack a number of internal safeguards or judicial oversight.
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http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/04/snowdens-leaks-forced-dea-end-its-own-mass-surveillance-program/109618/
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