A new report has revealed that the US Department of Justice was keeping a secret record of all calls in and out of US even before the start of the NSA programs.
According to The Verge, the database is referred to in a court filing obtained by the Wall Street Journal as part of a larger Iranian exporting case, incidentally revealing a decades-long program that captured phone records for every call in and out of the United States.
The program was initiated in the 90s and went on until August 2013 when it was shut down amid reports of DEA phone record collection.
The US government, for the first time, has publicly acknowledged that such a program did exist.