This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 8th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Almost a decade before September 11th, the Drug Enforcement Administration started its own bulk

phone records collection program and it covered almost every phone

call made to more than 100 countries across the globe.

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, offers this analysis.

Since the Edward Snowden revelations concerning NSA's bulk collection of domestic telephone records.

We've learned that that program has several precedents and USA Today has now revealed

perhaps the most extensive of them, a bulk collection program

that targeted some 116 different countries and collected metadata telephone records concerning American phone calls to all of those

countries.

This is essentially most of the countries around the world that the United States recognizes.

And it shows that the legal theory, the extraordinarily disturbing and legal theory underlying

the government's bulk collection of domestic phone records, in fact,

got its start much earlier.

This is a program that was launched almost two decades, or almost a decade before 9-11,

the 2001-9-11 attacks began in 1992 and seems to have operated on the same theory because the authority that was used

here is a Justice Department and DA authority to subpoena records and other tangible things that are relevant and

material to drug investigations. And so the theory on which they have to have been operating is essentially all calls to hundreds of countries are relevant to drug investigations, not obviously because most of those phone calls relate to drugs.

Of course the vast majority don't.

But the theory must have been, well, the whole database of calls is relevant because we can search through it and then find

the particular ones that are relevant to our drug investigations.

...