Furor Grows Over Feds Issuing Warrant-Less Subpoenas

http://www.wilm.com/articles/national-news-104668/furor-grows-over-feds-issuing-warrantless-13789165

A legal conflict is intensifying between federal officials and civil liberties advocates defending Americans’ medical privacy rights in a case that points to the increasingly frequent use by bureaucrats of judge-less, warrant-less subpoenas.

As things stand now, the Drug Enforcement Administration is winning and privacy rights are losing.

“It’s not like there’s ten of them. There’s probably thousands — I know there are thousands,” Matt Barden, spokesman for the DEA, told the Daily Caller News Foundation about the DEA’s use of administrative subpoenas.

Maybe not for much longer. A federal district court in Oregon has ruled against DEA but more recently another federal judge, in Texas, ruled in January in U.S. vs. Zadeh that DEA agents can anonymously issue warrant-less subpoenas to search the medical records of 35 patients of Drs. Joseph and Abbas Zadeh in Dallas.

The Zadehs’ case will soon be decided by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Forth Worth in a “precedent-setting” case on the Fourth Amendment rights of individual citizens versus federal power, said Andy Schlafly, an attorney for the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons, who is representing the Dallas doctors.

“It has an enormous chilling effect on the practice of medicine,” Schlafly said. “For millennia, going back to Hippocrates, there’s been an understanding of the confidentiality of the patient and the physician, and the patient has been able to speak freely to the physician with true understanding of confidentiality. But these subpoenas disrupt that.”

It’s a case that concerns — but doesn’t surprise — former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who joined U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., in suing the National Security Administration over its metadata cell phone collection.

“Literally, they let the DEA just go wandering through people’s medical records just to make sure laws aren’t being broken. Really? Are you serious?” Cuccinelli told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Many Americans may be surprised to know federal agencies can and do routinely access personal information, generally from businesses, without first persuading a judge that they have “probable cause” of finding specified items, as required by the Fourth Amendment.

Filed under: General Problems