The U.S. Justice Department Has Been Monitoring All Americans’ Overseas Phone Calls Since 1992

USA Today: U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades

Starting in 1992, the Justice Department amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries, a model for anti-terror surveillance after Sept. 11, 2001.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans' international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.

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, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.

Update: Report: DEA monitored Americans’ overseas phone calls -- Politico

WNU Editor: To put this into perspective .... NSA leaker Edward Snowden was 10 years old when this surveillance operation first started .... and it ended 20 years later when he leaked this information to the media in 2013.