Peace Activist's FOIA Accidentally Exposes:"DEA PAYS AT&T for Access to 26 Years of Phone Records"

[Recursion]

9. AT&T probably keeps the metadata forever

It's very useful for quality of service metrics

Any sane person who wants to do nefarious activities is going to switch to strong encryption

Encryption protects the contents, and phone traffic is encrypted for the most part as it is (even AT&T could only with difficulty listen to your conversations). Metadata is by design necessity unencrypted, and is by design necessity available to lots of third parties anyways even without nefarious shenanigans. Even if the government's access to the data is problematic, if people have been operating under the assumption that the routing of phone and internet data has been private, let that misunderstanding end now.