U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades

The DEA used its data collection extensively and in ways that the NSA is now prohibited from doing
USA Today (US)
Wednesday, April 8, 2015

For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking. The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to "designated foreign countries." The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA's intelligence arm, was the government's 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.