Massive surveillance didn’t just start after 9-11. The U.S. government through the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration started keeping secret records of virtually all Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. This became the “blueprint” for far broader National security surveillance.
The countries involved in the phone detail collection included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America and officials say helped to identify drug trafficking rings and money handlers. While the Justice Department has revealed this program, the vast scale of that operation (now discontinued) has not been disclosed until now. This was the first known effort by the U.S. government to sweep up bulk data records of its own citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime.
The DEA, by sweeping up the records, not the content, of international telephone calls allowed them to map suspect’s communications and link them to other police and intelligence data. They claimed to have the highest levels of the U.S. Government including Janet Reno, then attorney general and her deputy Eric Holder.
Needless to say, this was in violation of the U.S. Constitution, which requires warrants for such things. The foundations for the complete overthrow of the U.S. Constitution were laid decades ago. The United States will “repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government…” Testimonies for the Church, Vol. 5, page 451
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