{"id":7158,"date":"2015-04-09T06:18:45","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T11:18:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7158"},"modified":"2015-04-09T06:18:45","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T11:18:45","slug":"how-nsa-surveillance-was-birthed-from-the-drug-war-the-dea-tracked-billions-of-phone-calls-pre-911","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7158","title":{"rendered":"How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War \u2013 The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9\/11"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"post-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/libertyblitzkrieg.com\/2015\/04\/08\/how-nsa-surveillance-was-birthed-from-the-drug-war-the-dea-tracked-billions-of-phone-calls-pre-911\/\" target=\"_blank\">How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War \u2013 The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9\/11<\/a><\/h3>\n<p><em><b>The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA\u2019s intelligence arm, was the government\u2019s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans\u2019 privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><b>The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking \u2013 too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor\u201d to the NSA\u2019s terrorist surveillance.<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. \u201cThis was aimed squarely at Americans,\u201d said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. \u201cThat\u2019s very significant from a constitutional perspective.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden\u2019s revelations about other surveillance programs.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u2013 From today\u2019s\u00a0<em>USA Today\u00a0<\/em>article:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/news\/2015\/04\/07\/dea-bulk-telephone-surveillance-operation\/70808616\/\">U.S. Secretly Tracked Billions of Calls for Decades<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\">The drug war is something that wouldn\u2019t even exist in a rational, mature and\u00a0intelligent civilization. Not only is it ineffective, invasive and brutish, but we now know that the almost religious zealousness with which it has been pursued by its proponents has led directly to the current unconstitutional surveillance state. If not for our acquiescence\u00a0to the \u201cwar on drugs,\u201d would the authoritarian statists amongst us have been able to usher in the even more dangerous but similarly endless \u201cwar on terror?\u201d Personally, I doubt it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War \u2013 The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9\/11 The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA\u2019s intelligence arm, was the government\u2019s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[10,4677,4678,4676,249,4674,551,577,765],"class_list":["post-7158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-10","tag-dea","tag-drug-enforcement-agency","tag-drug-war","tag-edward-snowden","tag-government-surveillance","tag-national-security-agency","tag-nsa","tag-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7159,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7158\/revisions\/7159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}