Since then, both wars have become political shorthand. Both are brutally expensive and arguably un-winnable. And in both cases, use of the word "war" is a deliberate and calculated language choice. Americans are taught that a war is something an entire nation must fight, and something that requires sacrifice for the greater good. Considered in the context of government surveillance, both "wars" are euphemisms for a specific kind of government rationalization.

“The government has repeatedly tried to justify its spying activities on national security grounds, but it turns out it was doing much the same thing for years in aid of ordinary criminal investigations," said the ACLU attorney Patrick Toomey in an email via a spokesperson Tuesday night. "These new revelations are a reminder of how little we still know about the government's surveillance activities—including dragnet programs that operated for decades in secret."



We might actually be able to pinpoint the moment—sometime in 2002—when the rhetoric switched from "drugs" to "terror" as a reason officials gave to citizens who might question their actions. Take a look at Google's count of published incidences of the phrase "war on drugs" versus published incidences of the phrase "war on terror" over a 50-year period.

Published Incidences of the Phrases 'War on Terror' and 'War on Drugs' Over a 50-Year Period

Google ngram

It's clear now that officials looked to their surveillance tactics in the 1990s as a playbook for how to carry out—and, crucially, how to legally justify—mass surveillance after 9/11. From USA Today:

Both operations relied on an expansive interpretation of the word "relevant," for example—one that allowed the government to collect vast amounts of information on the premise that some tiny fraction of it would be useful to investigators. Both used similar internal safeguards, requiring analysts to certify that they had 'reasonable articulable suspicion'—a comparatively low legal threshold—that a phone number was linked to a drug or intelligence case before they could query the records.

And in both cases, government officials—first with the DEA and later with the NSA—coerced technology companies to share data about their customers, sometimes even paying them for information. In most cases, they didn't push back. None challenged subpoenas in court, USA Today reported.

But while the NSA queried its secret phone databases hundreds of times in a given year, DEA analysts "routinely performed that many searches in a day," USA Today found. Over a two-decade period, the DEA and the Justice Department used Pentagon-installed supercomputers to log "virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries"—the majority of countries recognized by the United States—including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Italy, Canada, Mexico, most of the countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean, plus other countries in western Africa, Asia, and Europe.