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Feds Operated Yet Another Secret Metadata Database Until 2013
A story at Ars Technica describes yet another Federal database of logged call details maintained by the Federal government which has now come to light, this one maintained by the Department of Justice rather than the NSA, and explains how it came to be discovered: [A] three-page partially-redacted affidavit from a top Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) official, which was filed Thursday, explained that the database was authorized under a particular federal drug trafficking statute. The law allows the government to use "administrative subpoenas" to obtain business records and other "tangible things." The affidavit does not specify which countries records were included, but specifically does mention Iran. ... This database program appears to be wholly separate from the National Security Agency’s metadata program revealed by Edward Snowden, but it targets similar materials and is collected by a different agency. The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, reported Friday that this newly-revealed program began in the 1990s and was shut down in August 2013. From elsewhere in the article:
"It’s now clear that multiple government agencies have tracked the calls that Americans make to their parents and relatives, friends, and business associates overseas, all without any suspicion of wrongdoing," [said ACLU lawyer Patrick Toomey]. "The DEA program shows yet again how strained and untenable legal theories have been used to secretly justify the surveillance of millions of innocent Americans using laws that were never written for that purpose."
You might actually want to be careful about characterizing European privacy law: while some of the traditional tax shelters may still be almost as quiet about banking details as Nevada is about incorporation, but broader protections of privacy can be rather patchy(It's generally not a good sign if a given country has people appealing to ECHR Article 8 for lack of more robust national laws).
The trouble with the US is not so much that our privacy laws are lousy (with respect to the government, with respect to private third parties Europe is merely toothless, while we practically take it as a point of national pride to ensure that the data brokers can do business unhindered by stifling regulation); but that we are really, really good at violating them; and have built up an impressive infrastructure for doing so.
Given the amount of cooperation from our various overseas friends revealed by the NSA leaks, I'd be a trifle nervous about assuming that a given European jurisdiction is necessarily more likely to be obeying its own laws, let alone providing a higher level of protection. (And I'm guessing that the past week or two are...unlikely...to be particularly helpful in encouraging privacy improvements.)