“TRANSNATIONAL AND ‘INCIDENTAL’ COMMUNICATIONS FROM THE WAR ON DRUGS TO 702”

Debates about the surveillance authorities of the U.S. today focus on the legitimacy of the collection and analysis of “incidental” communications of U.S. persons and others — communications collected without being themselves per se targeted, but then available for analysis. While today largely focused on transnational flows of internet traffic, these authorities emerged secretly from claims during the 1980s that the narcotics trade made an easy distinction between domestic and foreign communications untenable and required the analysis of what we would now call “metadata” that crossed borders. Combating drugs revealed the violability of the U.S. state, the argument went; soon this analysis was quickly applied to terrorism and then the internet.

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