I would like to point out that the last year when not a single law enforcement agency anywhere in the world could have possibly tapped anyone's phone was 1876.
150 years ago was the invention of the telephone, and I think that articles like this seem to assume that prior to this, police just never caught any criminals.
> 1876
A year when police were relatively rare, and quite new in the western legal experience, having only emerged from slave patrols in the United States and from the founding of the 1829 Scotland Yard in the United Kingdom. This is a year with living memory of a time when the state did not employ people to do what was ostensibly the civic responsibility of every person to quell crime and protect others.