It’s been just six weeks since Attorney General William Barr was sworn in, but the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General has already issued a report slamming a program Barr created
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On Thursday, the department's main in-house watchdog publicly released a long-awaited review of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s use of bulk collection of telephone-call data — a practice similar to the National Security Agency snooping program revealed in 2013 by contractor Edward Snowden.
The OIG report doesn’t criticize Barr directly, but says investigators found little evidence of a thorough legal review of the secretive program at its outset. Most of the report’s focus is on how the program evolved and expanded over time, with other law enforcement agencies being approved in 2006 to use the telephone call metadata in connection with cases having little or nothing to do with drugs.
“There were significant legal issues raised by the DEA's use of ‘exploratory subpoenas’ that warranted a careful examination, and … this did not occur,” the report says. The bulk-collection program was halted by the Obama Administration in 2013 following the Snowden revelations. The OIG report says a similar effort to identify telephone calls related to international drug trafficking is now conducted by DEA by querying data stored by private companies, rather than by putting large sets of data in government databases.
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