The DEA is spying on thousands of patient medical files without a warrant

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The Drug Enforcement Administration has been sifting through thousands of supposedly private medical files, looking for Texas doctors and patients to prosecute without the use of warrants.

“It’s not like there’s ten of them. There’s probably thousands — I know there are thousands,” Matt Barden, spokesman for the DEA, told the Daily Caller News Foundation about the DEA’s use of administrative subpoenas. But, as a legal brief filed last week points out, lawyers for the federal government can’t find a single case in which a court has “authorized the use of such a broad array of patient information with such a sparse record as to why it needs such information.”

In U.S. v Zadeh, the DEA obtained the records of 35 patient files without showing probable cause or obtaining a warrant issued by a judge. Citing New Deal-era case law, Judge Reed O’Connor noted that “the Supreme Court has refused to require that a federal agency have probable cause to justify issuance of an administrative subpoena,” and that they may be issued “merely on suspicion that the law is being violated, or even just because it wants assurance that it is not."

Andy Schlafly, the lawyer for the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons, has filed an amicus brief stating, “without a warrant and without initially identifying themselves, federal agents searched patient medical records . . . based merely on a state administrative subpoena. A month later the DEA sought enforcement . . . and none of the checks and balances against overreaching by one branch of government existed for this warrantless demand for medical records.”

“Literally, they let the DEA just go wandering through people’s medical records just to make sure laws aren’t being broken. Really? Are you serious?” former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said.

“I think that the public, we’re at a moment now where the public is becoming more aware of and alarmed at privacy violations by the government,” Nate Wessler, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union added. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot of awareness about how administrative subpoenas operate or certainly about the vast scale of their use.”