From 1987 on Drug Police Used AT$T Bugs

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing NSA's

By Scott Shane, Colin Moynihan, The New York Times

02 September 13

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counter narcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans' phone calls - parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency's hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.

The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between Federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the Government and the Telecommunications GIANT.

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.