Phone data collection crossed line in 1992: Our view

The Obama administration has repeatedly used the threat of post-9/11 terrorism to justify secretly vacuuming up the telephone records of virtually every American.

Now it turns out the government was grossly violating innocent citizens' privacy much earlier and for a more questionable reason.

For nearly a decade before 9/11, the Drug Enforcement Administration secretly collected the telephone records of millions of Americans as part of an effort to catch drug traffickers. The practice continued with the secret approval of top Justice Department officials under four presidents until it was halted in 2013, USA TODAY's Brad Heath reported last week.

The program, known as USTO, underscores what history has taught about government surveillance: Once the government finds a way to secretly collect masses of personal data, mission creep takes over and the collection grows. Soon, as former National Security Agency director Keith Alexander once put it, the government wants "the whole haystack to find the needle."

The problem is the haystacks aren't made of hay but of personal details about Americans, gathered on the chance that a tiny fraction might someday prevent a terrorist attack or, in the case of USTO, help break up a drug cartel. Those are not good enough reasons to apply a vacuum-cleaner approach that gratuitously sweeps up records from innocent people along with data from legitimate suspects.

Often in the nation's history, secret information-gathering — created with the best of intentions to battle a threat — has gone on to be abused.

Like so many of its predecessors, the program that became USTO started modestly. It started in the 1980s. DEA didn't intercept the content of calls, but agents gathered records — who was called, when and for how long — about individuals suspected of a link to drug trafficking. Pentagon supercomputers were added to help track drug and money-laundering networks.

In 1992, under President George H.W. Bush, the Justice Department crossed a line. No longer were individual records enough. Justice demanded that phone companies turn over mass data on all calls from the USA to certain nations. Starting with a few countries, the secret program swelled to gather data about calls to 116, including Canada, Mexico, much of Latin America and parts of Europe and Asia.

Demands for data were not reviewed by any judge. And USTO appears to have been the model for NSA's even more intrusive data collection after 9/11, which also swept in domestic calls.

Attorney General Eric Holder finally halted USTO in September 2013 — more than four years after he took office and only amid growing outrage over the NSA "metadata" collection.

After failing last year, Congress will try again this year to rein in the NSA program. While lawmakers are at it, they ought to look more deeply into its predecessor and find new privacy protections. In the age of technology, massive collections of data are easy to start but very hard to dismantle.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

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