U.S. government has been keeping database of telephone calls to foreign countries for over a decade

The Justice Department secretly kept a database of Americans' calls to foreign countries for more than a decade, according to a new court filing and officials familiar with the program.

The revelation of another secret government database storing records of Americans' calls came in a filing Thursday in the case of a man accused of conspiring to unlawfully export electronic goods to Iran.

A Drug Enforcement Administration official said in the filing that the agency, which is an arm of 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 court document only refers to collecting outgoing U.S. calls, though people familiar with the program said it also collected data on incoming calls.

The program didn't monitor the content of the calls.

The document doesn't identify the countries or say how many countries were involved, though it acknowledges Iran was one of the countries. The program began in the 1990s, say people familiar with its operation, and was ended in August 2013 amid reports about the DEA gathering phone records in other ways.

A Justice Department official said the database was deleted and hasn't been searched since 2013, and said the DEA is no longer collecting bulk phone records from U.S. phone companies.

Patrick Toomey, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new disclosures show "the government has extended its use of bulk collection far beyond" terror and national-security cases into ordinary criminal investigations.

Last March, the then-head of the Senate Judiciary Committee raised concerns with Attorney General Eric Holder in a private letter. In the letter, made public Friday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) wrote: "I am deeply concerned about this kind of suspicionless intrusion into American's privacy in any context, but it is particularly troubling when done for routine criminal investigations.'' He noted the program has never been reviewed by any court, and no judge had ever placed any controls on how and when the database was searched.

The court document is a sworn declaration by DEA Assistant Special Agent in Charge Robert Patterson, which came in response to a judge's demands for answers in the case of Shantia Hassanshahi, who was arrested in 2013 in Los Angeles and is fighting the charge against him. In his case, agents said they used the database to trace a suspicious number in Iran to a phone linked to Mr. Hassanshahi.

The database "could be used to query a telephone number where federal law-enforcement officials had a reasonable articulable suspicion that the telephone number at issue was related to an ongoing federal criminal investigation," according to the court document.

The Iranian phone number at issue "was determined to meet this standard based on specific information indicating that the Iranian number was being used for the purpose of importing technological goods to Iran in violation of United States law,'' Mr. Patterson said in the declaration.

As described in the court papers, the DEA database sounds similar to one kept by the National Security Agency, though the NSA gathers both foreign and domestic calls. And the NSA program differs in another key way: It is authorized and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The DEA, according to the filing, gathered data simply though administrative subpoenas that aren't reviewed by a judge.

Civil liberties groups have called for an end to the NSA program, saying it violates Americans' privacy. Courts are now weighing several legal challenges to that program.

In court filings in Mr. Hassanshahi's case, his lawyer, Saied Kashani, has sought to have the phone evidence suppressed, saying the database "as described functions entirely like the NSA database...which is likely unconstitutional." After reading the new filing, he said the government "has converted the war on drugs into a war on privacy.''

The lawyer said the DEA took a law originally meant to authorize specific, targeted requests for information from drug companies and turned it into a general sweep of millions of Americans' phone records.

"I think when Congress passed this statute they had no intention that an agency would use it to generate these vast quantities of information in a database on innocent Americans,'' Mr. Kashani said.

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