May 16, 2006
What NSA phone spying?
How many angels cannot dance on the head of a pen register?
Verizon Communications Inc. on Tuesday joined fellow phone company BellSouth Corp. in denying key points of a USA Today story that said the companies had provided records of millions of phone calls to the government.
Verizon has not provided customer call data to the National Security Agency, nor had it been asked to do so, the company said in an e-mailed statement. The statement came a day after BellSouth Corp. made a similar denial...
The denials leave open the possibility that the NSA directed its requests to long-distance companies, or that call data was collected by other means. Long-distance calls placed by BellSouth and Verizon subscribers can traverse the networks of other carriers who collect a variety of information for billing purposes.
A story in USA Today last Thursday said Verizon, AT&T Inc. and BellSouth had complied with an NSA request for tens of millions of customer phone records after the 2001 terror attacks. The report sparked a national debate on federal surveillance tactics...
The denials by Verizon and BellSouth leave AT&T as the sole company named in the USA Today article that hasn't denied involvement...
A tempest that may not be a Teapot Dome?
Mark C.
Posted by markc at May 16, 2006 08:53 PM