When they say it goies back to at least 1987, I think they are referring to the Daytona database of call detail records (CDRs). That project was active in the 80's, but it goes back much farther, and it may contain most of the CDRs ever created. In it's early stages, punched cards, and later magnetic tapes, were trucked to Bell Labs and subsequently AT&T Labs, where the Daytona system was operated. In it's heyday it was the biggest database on Earth.

There may be a successor to Daytona by now, and "all the CDRs, ever" is not as impressive as it once was, but it is likely that joint telco/government projects like Daytona have been collecting and analyzing call data since there was call data to analyze.

I would not be surprised if they are still using Daytona's query language.