Venture Beat
It seems the U.S. government and AT&T are much closer than we thought. The Drug Enforcement Agency has access to 26 years of call data for all calls that run through AT&T’s switches, according to leaked documents detailing the program.
The documents, acquired by the New York Times, reveal a program called Hemisphere, which was formed in 2007. AT&T created a huge database of all the calls that pass through its switches, including both customer and non-customer calls. Through this program, the government is able to subpoena that data and even pays AT&T employees to sit in drug enforcement offices to help with the data collection progress.