When the Drug Enforcement Administration’s access to a secret trove of billions of American phone records was exposed in 2013, the Obama administration said the data had been collected under a perfectly legal program.

Civil liberties advocates, however, were not convinced about that the data collection program — which let the DEA see who you called, and who they called too — was aboveboard.

Now, the advocates are learning more than a decade later that they had a clutch of surprising allies: DEA officials on the inside — whose internal alarms were kept secret.

Watchdog findings released last week show that government officials had privately raised questions about the program for years — including a high-ranking DEA agent who expressed “major” concerns. The FBI even halted its own agents’ access to the database for months.

The DEA’s “Hemisphere” project went ahead despite the apprehensions — and continues to this day.

With new details about the program coming to light, the civil liberties advocates in Washington, including those in Congress are again raising their concerns. One watchdog group said the latest revelations show that the program was flawed from the beginning.

“There should have been no question from the very start that this program needed a proper legal analysis, to determine whether there was the authority for the government to obtain this type of information in bulk through administrative subpoenas,” said Jeramie Scott, a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s a real failure of oversight and accountability that years went by without a proper legal analysis.”

Massive Collection

When the DEA’s program was made public, it immediately drew comparisons to the National Security Agency’s domestic phone call database revealed by Edward Snowden.

The key details of the DEA program were shocking to civil liberties advocates: AT&T had made billions of phone call records available to the agency and other law enforcement agencies in exchange for payment.

Those records did not include the content of calls, but they did include metadata information on the........

© The Intercept