Government used the drug war as an excuse for mass surveillance pre-9/11
The war on terror may be the excuse du jour for mass surveillance of American citizens, but before 9/11, the war on drugs filled that role.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) kept logs of billions of Americans' phone calls in the 1990s, particularly focusing on calls to and from 116 countries linked to drug trafficking. The DOJ says the DEA "is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers" today.
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