techdirt: Court Says Government Has To Reveal If It Kept The Data From The DEA’s Mass Surveillance Program

techdirt: Court Says Government Has To Reveal If It Kept The Data From The DEA’s Mass Surveillance Program by Mike Masnick:

Back in April, USA Today had a detailed report on a massive DEA phone records surveillance program that pre-dated 9/11 (and the NSA’s similar phone records mass collection). The DOJ put an end to the DEA’s program after the Snowden revelations when it realized that the government’s own defense of why the NSA program was legal would conflict with the DEA program. Specifically, it kept trotting out “terorrism” and “national security” but that didn’t apply to the DEA’s program, which was actually used much more widely than the NSA’s (according to the report, the DEA searched the database as many times in a day as the NSA did in a year). However, a day after this report, Human Rights Watch, represented by the EFF, sued the DEA over the program — citing both the First and Fourth Amendment as being violated.

As expected, the DEA pulled out the usual defenses to try to get the lawsuit dismissed, including arguing that without direct evidence of surveillance on Human Rights Watch, the organization had no standing. Those arguments were given much more credence by the courts in the pre-Snowden era, but lately the courts have been much more skeptical. And, thus, the district court has (somewhat, narrowly) rejected this argument by the DEA and allowed the EFF to move forward with a bit of discovery, which hopefully will enable it to find out at least some details of the surveillance program.

More specifically, the court ruling by Judge Philip Guitierrez says that HRW has enough standing on the 4th Amendment question, but not on the 1st Amendment question. Specifically, on the 4th Amendment issue, the court finds HRW’s claims to be entirely plausible, which is enough to allow discovery.