New lawsuit says DEA phone surveillance was illegal

The Justice Department violated the Constitution by secretly gathering logs of billions of calls from the United States to as many as 116 countries, Human Rights Watch alleged in a lawsuit filed against the government on Wednesday.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, asks a judge to declare that the now-halted surveillance operation was illegal and to permanently block the government from restarting it.

"It's time to end the program, and bulk surveillance, once and for all," Nate Cardozo, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing the group, wrote in a blog post.

The Justice Department acknowledged in January that the Drug Enforcement Administration had been secretly gathering logs of Americans' international phone calls. USA TODAY reported on Tuesday that the program began nearly a decade before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance program that followed. It included virtually all calls from the United States to Mexico, Canada and most of the countries in South and Central America.

The suit is the latest legal challenge to government data-gathering that EFF and other privacy advocates argue are unconstitutional. The group is also pressing a lawsuit challenging the NSA's surveillance program, which includes records of Americans' domestic phone calls.

In the suit filed Wednesday, Human Rights Watch complained that its records had been "collected, retained, searched, and disseminated without any suspicion of wrongdoing and without any judicial authorization or oversight." The group said that such sweeping surveillance violated its First and Fourth Amendment rights, and that it should be able to make international calls without having the government keep a record of them.

"Who we communicate with and when we communicate with them is often extraordinarily sensitive — and it's information that we would never turn over to the government lightly," Human Rights Watch General Counsel Dinah PoKempner said in a statement.

The Justice Department halted the data collection in September 2013 and later deleted its database of call records.

The DEA surveillance program, known within the agency as USTO, was the government's first known effort to collect electronic data about Americans in bulk, without regard to whether they were suspected of crimes. The agency did that using its authority to issue administrative subpoenas for records relevant to drug investigations.

Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said in a statement on Tuesday that the DEA "is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers."

Follow investigative reporter Brad Heath on Twitter at @bradheath