The federal government, working in partnership with the private telecommunications giant AT&T, maintains an elaborate database of phone user data that surpasses anything even the NSA is using, according to new reporting by the New York Times.

Based on documents obtained by a New York citizen via a Freedom of Information Act request, the Times says that "for at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls."

Details of the program were made available in a series of slides released as part of the FOIA disclosure and are viewable here.