Utah law enforcement officials searched, without a warrant, the prescription drug records of 480 public paramedics, firefighters and other personnel to try to figure out who was stealing morphine from emergency vehicles.

This type of snooping doesn't require crypto-cracking technology or other National Security Agency spying tools disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. All it took was a law enforcement official's hunch in this case to search every member of the Unified Fire Authority's prescription records.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday derided the 2013 dragnet search as "shocking" and called it a "disregard for basic legal protections" to provide law enforcement with "unfettered" access to such private data.

The warrantless search of Utah's database chronicling every controlled substance dispensed by a pharmacist resulted in charges against one paramedic that have nothing to do with the original investigation. Instead, the authorities discovered an employee whose records exhibited "the appearance of Opioid dependence" and lodged prescription fraud charges against paramedic Ryan Pyle. Now Pyle faces a maximum five-year prison sentence if convicted of the felony.

"To me, it's outrageous government conduct," Pyle's attorney, Rebecca Skordas, said in a telephone interview Monday.

In a court filing, Utah prosecutors said the database was created for precisely prosecutions like Pyle's. What's more, Utah Assistant Attorney General Lana Taylor wrote that an "individual's right to privacy in his medical records is not absolute" (PDF).

Skordas has filed a motion (PDF) in a Utah trial court seeking to have the fruits of the warrantless database search tossed.

Many states like Utah allow similar databases to be accessed by the authorities without probable-cause warrants. Utah's law, however, is among the most lenient, permitting law enforcement agents to log in to it whenever they are "engaged as a specified duty of their employment in enforcing laws" about controlled substances.

"As long as there is an open investigation to which the search is somehow linked, any officer whose job description includes investigating violations of controlled substances laws could, consistent with the statute, download the prescription histories of every person who lives, works, or uses a pharmacy within their jurisdiction and search through those records in hopes of finding something suspicious," wrote John Mejia, an ACLU attorney, to the Utah trial court Monday in a friend-of-the-court brief (PDF).

Skordas, meanwhile, said that Pyle never worked at one of the three stations where the drugs were allegedly stolen, and no charges were ever brought in the case of the missing morphine. In her motion to suppress, Skordas wrote that the search was a breach of the Utah and federal constitutions.

The case law on the topic is all over the book nationwide. But in the most recent case, a federal judge ruled in February that warrants were required to search prescription drug records in Oregon.

In a signed declaration, Pyle told the Utah court that he has "sought medical care for various illnesses, surgery, and injuries" while employed at the Unified Fire Authority.

The ACLU said in its brief that "controlled substances" catalogued in the Utah and other databases contain a laundry list of drugs for common ailments to treat anxiety, weight loss, cancer, addiction, chronic pain, testosterone deficiency, gender identity, narcolepsy, insomnia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and others.

"A patient’s prescription history can reveal her physician’s confidential medical advice, her chosen course of treatment, her diagnosis, and even the stage or severity of her disorder or disease," Mejia wrote.