A redacted document made public late last week indicated the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) recently halted a decade and a half of spying on essentially all international phone calls made by Americans to a select list of countries. Other than Iran, it is unknown what nations are on that list, and the surveillance occured without judicial review.
The surveillance, which ran from 1998 to 2013, was not designed for national security purposes; rather, the information gathered was used in domestic court cases. These revelations are evidence that Washington has "converted the war on drugs into a war on privacy," said Saied Kashani, a lawyer involved in the court case which led to the program's disclosure.
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