Federal Audit: Secret Surveillance Program Helped DEA Seize Over $50 Million In Cash And Real Estate
Under a sweeping surveillance program, the Drug Enforcement Administration secretly spied on Americans who bought money counters, “the vast majority” of whom “were never shown to be connected to illicit drug-related activities.” In an extensive audit, the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General revealed that between 2008 and 2014, the DEA had collected tens of thousands of records, including the names, addresses, and phone numbers of buyers, though only 131 arrests were made. (The DEA declined to reveal how many convictions were secured following those arrests.) During the same period, however, bulk purchaser data helped the DEA seize $48 million in cash, $4 million in real estate, 88 vehicles, and 179 firearms, as well as nearly 1,500 pounds of cocaine and over 21,300 pounds of marijuana.
Identified only as “Program B” in a heavily redacted report, the Inspector General found that the DEA routinely issued “administrative” subpoenas to companies that sold money counters. Not only were those subpoenas conducted without any court oversight, they were “unrelated to a specific drug trafficking investigation or target.” Once collected, the DEA would then send the raw data from thousands of purchases directly to its field offices, which would cross-reference the data with several law enforcement databases.
The Inspector General also found it “troubling” that the DEA “failed to conduct a comprehensive legal analysis” before starting its bulk data collection. In fact, when asked for a legal review over the subpoena program, one manager in the DEA’s Office of Chief Counsel responded, “Unless a federal court tells us we can’t do this, I think we can continue this project.”
Moreover, the DEA actively worked to keep the program “from becoming publicly known,” telling personnel “not to disclose the source of names…when documenting their investigations.” This stratagem, the Inspector General recounted, was “intended to protect the program’s sources and methods; criminals would obtain money counters by other means if they knew that the DEA collected this data.”
In a dark irony, the DEA’s dragnet collected so many records on money-counter buyers, field offices complained that that they “did not have the time to review it all” and that the bulk data was “too voluminous to use efficiently.” Several field offices griped about “the poor quality of the leads,” with one DEA staff coordinator writing that there were “so many [leads] we put out, we don’t know what’s being done, and why some are better than others.”
After relaying data “indiscriminately” for almost five years, the DEA decided to improve the quality of the leads it sent to field offices; it would first search for hits in other federal databases. In May 2013, the DEA began sending the bulk money-counter data to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) Fusion Center, which holds over 500 million records from more than 15 different federal agencies, including the ATF, FBI, and ICE.
Yet the fusion center also used the DEA-supplied purchaser data to create “intelligence products” that had “no connection to drug crimes.” Since the DEA’s subpoena power was supposed to aid its ability to investigate drug crimes, the Inspector General argued that transferring bulk data to the fusion center was “tantamount to the DEA lending out its subpoena authority to agencies lacking their own.”
But then the DEA faced objections from a surprising source of civil libertarians: the FBI. Several FBI agents raised concerns about the “legality” of the DEA’s administrative subpoenas with the fusion center’s deputy director. As one FBI agent noted, the DEA issuing blanket subpoenas “wasn’t predicated on individual cases or individual suspicions,” but was “just a general fishing expedition.” “You can’t just take any innocent activity that Americans engage in and go grab all their records knowing that a small percentage of it is potentially connected to illegal activity,” the agent added. “And that sounded exactly like what DEA was looking to do.”
The agents were also worried that the fusion center would be “running all of these names, which had been collected without foundation, through a massive government database and producing comprehensive intelligence products on any ‘hits,’ which included detailed information on family members and pictures.” That type of surveillance “didn’t sit right with any of [them],” they told the Inspector General.
Shortly after they raised their concerns, the FBI announced it wouldn’t participate in the bulk money-counter data program and even barred the DEA from using its fusion-center records. Those decisions, along with Edward Snowden’s blockbuster revelations about the NSA, persuaded the DEA to wind down its dragnet in late 2013.
Although both the Justice Department and the DEA say they have “no plans to reinstate any of the discontinued bulk collection programs,” the Inspector General noted that “there is nothing preventing the DEA or the Department from seeking to start such a program at any time in the future.”
“DEA is committed to ensuring its practices comply with all Department of Justice policies and procedures and continue to be vetted through a rigorous legal review. The DEA agrees with the OIG’s recommendation for further improvement of its administrative subpoenas with respect to data collection, and has already begun enhancing these processes,” Mary Brandenberger, chief of the DEA’s National Media Affairs Section, said in a statement. “As a member of the intelligence community, DEA and other law enforcement entities receive tips and information from a wide array of sources. We take very seriously our responsibility to remain fair and impartial during criminal investigations, and remain closely tethered to the rule of law.”
The DEA is no stranger to withering criticism from federal auditors. Previously, the Inspector General reproached the DEA over its prodigious use of civil forfeiture, which let the agency confiscate over $3.2 billion from 65,000 cash seizures; slammed the DEA for its confidential source program, which rewards informants with money taken through forfeiture; and raised “civil rights concerns” about the agency seizing cash without warrants in its version of stop-and-frisk
Filed under: General Problems
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