By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
The DEA and Justice Department have been secretly amassing logs of nearly all international phone calls that originated from the U.S., the USA Today reports.
The collection of billions of calls came nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The government has tracked calls to as many as 116 countries, including Canada, Mexico and most of South America.
The records helped investigators track the distribution networks of drug cartels.
According to the USA Today,
The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks.
That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.
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