Following a week of public outrage over supposed massive phone call record collection by the NSA, the notion that the phone companies handed over volumes of private individual call records to the feds is starting to sound…well, not true.
BellSouth earlier this week denied ever having done such a thing. Now both Verizon and AT&T are saying the same thing. (Verizon statement posted at WSJ here.) In fact, both companies say they weren’t even approached by the NSA to turn over phone calling records.
According to this WSJ piece, AT&T has said
it “does not allow wiretapping without a court order nor has it otherwise given customer information to law enforcement authorities or government agencies without legal authorization.”
This whole uproar was started by an article in USA Today, and it looks like the paper is coming under some scrutiny for the veracity of its piece.
In a statement, USA Today said: “Sources told us that BellSouth and Verizon records are included in the database. We’ve read the statements by BellSouth and Verizon and all we can do is continue to investigate and pursue the story. We’re confident in our coverage of the phone database story, but we won’t summarily dismiss BellSouth’s and Verizon’s denials without taking a closer look.”
What possibly gets USA Today off the hook here is that Qwest has admitted it was approached by the NSA about calling record collection efforts. The telco says it spurned the agency’s pursuit of these data.
Qwest, however, has a long-haul network and it’s possible the feds were approaching only leading long distance voice carriers, particularly in the two or three years following September 11. If that’s the case, the government could have also approached MCI and AT&T — two long distance voice companies only recently acquired by Verizon and SBC, respectively.
“How do you explain that BellSouth and Verizon were not asked but Qwest was asked? It may be because Qwest has a long-haul network, and thus is in a different position than those two companies,” said Philip J. Weiser, a University of Colorado law professor and former Justice Department telecommunications specialist.
Further complicating the picture is the government’s defense of such activity following the publication of the article.
In a CNBC interview, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while declining to comment on the USA Today report, said the courts have deemed phone-company records as not being protected by privacy laws. “These are business records,” he said. “There are no reasonable expectations of privacy under the Fourth Amendment.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 2:27 PM|Comments(0)
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