Feds have been illegally spying on phone calls since 1987

Daily Mail, UK - A secret government program called Hemisphere gives federal agents nearly instantaneous access to billions of AT&T phone records dating as far back as 1987, all without a court order or the oversight of a judge. It's a spying database that dwarfs anything built by the National Security Agency to date - and federal agents have routine access to it to conduct criminal investigations. The AT&T database contains the location, time, phone number and other metadata from every phone call that crosses the AT&T relay switches - an estimated 4 billion calls a day. Because the database captures any call that travels across the company's lines, calls made by users of other carriers are also included. Since 2007, federal agents have been able to access the trove of information in minutes - simply by issuing a subpoena.