More on phone records
First Qwest, now Bellsouth says they didn’t do it:
BellSouth says it has no evidence it was contacted by a U.S. spy agency or gave the government access to any of its customers’ phone call records, disputing a published report that sparked a national debate on federal surveillance tactics.
The regional Bell, which offers telecommunication services in nine Southeastern states, said Monday it had conducted a “thorough review” and established that it had not given the National Security Agency customer call records.
A report Thursday by USA Today identified BellSouth Corp., along with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., as companies that had complied with an NSA request for tens of millions of customer phone records after the 2001 terror attacks. Experts said the agency was likely seeking to detect calling patterns in the mountain of data.
“Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA,” the company said in a statement.
As for Verizon:
Verizon spokesman Bob Varettoni referred to a company statement Friday that said Verizon doesn’t “provide any government agency unfettered access to our customer records or provide information to the government under circumstances that would allow a fishing expedition.”
Increasingly, it looks like someone went and got me all worked up for nothing.
May 16th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Amen
May 16th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
They all say they did not provide the information or were not contacted. That doesn’t mean gov didn’t do it without permission.
May 16th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
As Glenn points out, the MSM is winning…
http://instapundit.com/archives/030341.php
May 16th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Actually if you parse their VERY CAREFULLY WORDED statements, you’ll not they never said the NSA didnt get records, they say they didnt get records by a contract, or that no records were released illegally.
Non-denial denials.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
The issues are several fold…first as Chris notes, other than Qwest, they all seem to have given carefully worded statements. Beyond that, why did the government ask for this info in the first place w/o a warrant or anything like that?
May 16th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
Why the hell not? Government can ask for anything it wants. Warrants are for telling, not asking.
May 16th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
Ahh, there it is – at PowerLine: http://powerlineblog.com/archives/014068.php
This subsection:
“Duty to provide.–A wire or electronic communication service provider shall comply with a request for subscriber information and toll billing records information, or electronic communication transactional records in its custody or possession made by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under subsection (b) of this section.”
(Subsection b defines who the Director of the FBI is.)
Note that it must be from the FBI, but meh thinks it’s a minor point now.
Also, if this is accurate and applies, then QWest is (was) in violation.
May 16th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
Upon re-reading the statement and comparing it to what I posted, Bell South and QWest may be accurate – in a form of non-denial denal as noted above. BS states that they did not give anything to the NSA. The above statute specifies the FBI….
cleveressss… .my preciousssss….
May 17th, 2006 at 8:57 am
You guys may be right about the timing on the recent article in USA Today. It may be related to Hayden’s appointment. What is interesting, however, is that USA Today published essentially the same allegations on Feb 6, 2006 (http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-02-05-nsa-telecoms_x.htm), citing “seven telecommunications executives” as their source and alleging that ATT, MCI, and Sprint began sharing systemwide data with the federal government so it could query for potential surveillance targets. The Feb 6 article better describes the scope and operation of the NSA program. It may be that USA Today decided to repeat the story when Hayden’s nomination made it pertinent once again.
In any case, the Feb 6 story was not politically timed. Between that story and some of the filings related to a class-action lawsuit filed against ATT (http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/), you can get a fairly good understanding of the mechanics and procedures.
Rather than law enforcement operating as it usually does, approaching the telecom with a name or a number or an account, the government pick targets at random, querying the database, for example, for everyone in the 865 area code placing or receiving a call routed to Afghanistan in Oct 2002.
This may seem justified, but queries could also select everyone in who visited sayuncle.com in Feb 2004 on ATT switches and fibers. The universe of potential queries is far larger than the universe of legitimate terror-related queries. All that prevents an NSA worker from abusing the power is each individual worker’s goodwill and integrity. No court oversees this aspect of the process.
How NSA proceeds from systemwide queries to individual surveillance is not clear. Whether they can scan content of communications is not clear. They could potentially be duplicating traffic and filtering out messages containing keywords or using voice-recognition software to detect what language is being spoken. Again, there would be a small universe of legitimate targets and filters within a much larger universe. Where in the process a judge is allowed oversight is not clear.
Ordinary citizens may have little to worry about even if these powers were and are abused, but all manner of potential abuses exist. A business with political connections could obtain information about competitors. Candidates, reporters, lawyers all could suffer from loss of privacy.
From my reading of the various articles and court filings, there seems to be a great deal of potential for abuse and little reason to rule out abuses having occured. I believe I am justified in expecting adequate oversight and record-keeping to allow an investigator to ascertain whether abusive queries or surveillance has occured. I believe the onus is on the Executive Branch to justify its actions, not on potential victims to detect and prove they were illegally targeted.
EFF has attempted to file evidence of its allegations against ATT in its class-action lawsuit, but DOJ demanded the records be sealed, then demanded they not be filed at all. The evidence appears to be testimony of a former ATT engineer and physical documents supporting his claims. ATT has demanded documents it considers confidential and proprietary be returned and the former employee identified.
May 17th, 2006 at 8:59 am
persimmon, good point on repeating the story when it is more relevant.