The bulk collection of phone calls by government agencies didn't start with the programs that Edward Snowden revealed, nor even with the tracking put in place after 9/11. It goes back to the Bush years. The first President Bush.
A USA Today report has that bulk collection of billions of calls began as early as 1992, when the Drug Enforcement Agency and Justice Department began tracking all calls to targeted foreign countries in efforts to stymie drug trafficking. They collected data from 116 countries in all, including Canada and most countries in Central and South America.The program did not put wiretaps on the calls, but created detailed call records including all the relevant metadata.
The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA's intelligence arm, was the government's first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime.
This bulk collection reportedly helped federal agencies determine that the Oklahoma City Bombing was an act of domestic terrorism. And while the program has now just been publicly revealed, the USA Today report says it was the inspiration for the NSA's bulk gathering of phone data in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Source: USA Today