"The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987."

"Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers."

"Some four billion call records are added to the database every day"

No wonder phone number portability got pushed through.