The Drug Enforcement Administration secretly collected bulk records of Americans' purchases of money-counting machines to look for possible drug traffickers — and hid the practice from judges and defendants, The New York Times reported.
The DEA in 2008 began to issue blanket administrative subpoenas to learn who was buying money counters, according to an inspector general report. The subpoenas involved no court oversight nor were they pegged to any particular probe.
The agency ultimately collected tens of thousands of records showing the names and addresses of people who bought the devices until the practice stopped in 2013 amid the furor over Edward Snowden's national security leaks, the Times reported.
In an apparent slip-up, the OIG report contained one uncensored reference about how DEA policy called for hiding the fact the names of suspects came from its database of its money-counter purchases.
That instruction "was intended to protect the program's sources and methods; criminals would obtain money counters by other means if they knew that the DEA collected this data," it said, the Times reported.
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