Washington Times | January 17, 2015
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A new document reveals that the U.S. Department of Justice secretly kept track of Americans’ calls to foreign countries for more than a decade to track drug trafficking and other criminal activities.
The new database of stored calls was described in a filing Thursday in the case of a man accused of conspiring to unlawfully export goods to Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
A Drug Enforcement Administration official said in the filing that the agency, which operates under the Justice Department, has long used administrative subpoenas — not federal court orders — to collect the metadata of U.S. calls to foreign countries “that were determined to have a demonstrated nexus to international drug trafficking and related criminal activities,” the Journal reported.