IP Democracy: Making Sense of the NSA Story

My reading of Cynthia’s lucid post and the documents she links to leads me to agree with her speculation that “the feds were approaching only leading long distance voice carriers.”

The AT&T response denies “wiretapping,” which is is not what the USA Today story claimed, so that denial is not especially meaningful. It also says AT&T does not give customer info “without legal authorization.” This could be read to mean that the company (presumably the original AT&T, not SBC) provided information and believed they had legal authorization based on Administration arguments as to legality. As I read this, it’s not really a denial that AT&T provided call data.

And the Verizon statement says:

One of the most glaring and repeated falsehoods in the media reporting is the assertion that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Verizon was approached by NSA and entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers’ domestic calls.

Maybe Verizon wasn’t approached, but MCI was.

This is false. From the time of the 9/11 attacks until just four months ago, Verizon had three major businesses – its wireline phone business, its wireless company and its directory publishing business. It also had its own Internet Service Provider and long-distance businesses. Contrary to the media reports, Verizon was not asked by NSA to provide, nor did Verizon provide, customer phone records from any of these businesses, or any call data from those records. None of these companies – wireless or wireline – provided customer records or call data.

This still leaves open the possibility that MCI was approached. All of the above appears to describe Verizon’s business at that time, not MCI’s.

Another error is the claim that data on local calls is being turned over to NSA and that simple “calls across town” are being “tracked.” In fact, phone companies do not even make records of local calls in most cases because the vast majority of customers are not billed per call for local calls. In any event, the claim is just wrong. As stated above, Verizon’s wireless and wireline companies did not provide to NSA customer records or call data, local or otherwise.

This part of the statement focuses even more specifically on local calls, which again leaves open the possibility of MCI being contacted and providing data. And given that the entire statement does not seem to even mention MCI’s business, I’m tempted to read it as confirming that MCI was contacted and did provide long distance calling data.

Again, Verizon cannot and will not confirm or deny whether it has any relationship to the classified NSA program.

This last statement leaves open the possibility that today’s Verizon, which DOES include the former MCI, may in fact have “a relationship to the classified NSA program.”

And, as Cynthia noted, Qwest has acknowledged it was contacted.

The BellSouth calling data is harder to make sense of. The WSJ reported that “In a statement, USA Today said: ‘Sources told us that BellSouth and Verizon records are included in the database.’”

My only speculation that could sort of reconcile this with our working theory is that some records involving BellSouth local phone numbers were included in the data provided by one of the major IXCs, and the details of the situation got a bit muddied in the translation (which seems clearly to be the case here, at a minimum).

I don’t know if anyone else has come up with this same conclusion, but I’d bet a few bucks that Cynthia got it right and that we’ll be hearing something along these lines from USA Today after it does a little more digging.

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on May 17, 2006 6:21 PM to IP Democracy