It's not just the NSA: The DEA has been spying on us, too


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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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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