[mountainb]

Many civil claims have short statutes of limitation as well. It's not really that good for these companies to maintain regular business records going back to infinity that are subject to discovery in disputes that are not even related to anything the telecom company did. Complying with the discovery requests and subpoenas is expensive. The fetish for the somewhat imagined benefits of big data creates open-ended liabilities for these companies. But the pressure that law enforcement and the spy agencies put on the telecom companies to facilitate this has been an open secret for a long time now.

A lot of this is on the federal government and Congress for leaving an area in which it has power dormant and within its relatively exclusive control. Thanks for the conversation.