Government used the drug war as an excuse for mass surveillance pre-9/11

(Image credit: iStock)

published 8 April 2015

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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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.