Uh-OH! USA Today's NSA wiretap story is falling apart

I heard this on Rush the other day. There you go the phone companies so it ain't so...well at leat via e-mail they do.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,195745,00.html

NEW YORK — Verizon Communications Inc. denied Tuesday that it had received a request for customer phone records from the National Security Agency, bringing into question key points of a USA Today story.

"Contrary to the media reports, Verizon was not asked by NSA to provide, nor did Verizon provide, customer phone records," the New York-based phone company said in an e-mailed statement.

The statement came a day after BellSouth Corp. also said the NSA had never requested customer call data, nor had the company provided any.


Verizon's statement Tuesday apparently did not apply to MCI, which Verizon acquired in January. In an earlier statement, Verizon said it is in the process of ensuring that its policies are put in place in the former MCI business.

MCI had a long-distance consumer business, but its main source of revenue was corporate clients.

:sarcasm: <----LOOK HERE

The high wire act of trying to deny the story enough to keep from being losing business and/or being the recipient of litigious action by its customers

and

telling the truth.

Tough balancing act, that.

MKJ

and they DID NOT agree to provide it.

Now suddenly the other companies were never ever asked to provide data.

Huh?

It's all BULLCRAP!

Check out this link, which should explain a bit more what's going on now:

If they have not given phone records to the US Government, why not just say so? They specify the NSA. Maybe they gave the records to the PEntagon or the FBI or the CIA or some other newly named NSA org.

They also use the word "gave". Maybe they sold the information. It could be that they left the security door open and allowed the NSA to take it themselves.

Parsing seems to be the name of the game.

mannerisms/body language. I get the feeling that this word management has increased significantly since Gonzalez became AG. Perhaps it's just that he is so obvious when he does it. He probably conducts how-to seminars for other employees of the administration so they can get by with as much as possible. The sad thing is that we have been so trusting, we feel like fools when the old quotes are brought forth and you see how they wiggled themselves past the truth and pulled another one off on us.

I phoned an attorney at the DOJ a couple weeks back about a records request. When I tightened my question to him to eliminate any prevaricating, he gave me a tight answer, stating that he wasn't "trying to be cute." "You wouldn't believe how many government officials try to 'be cute.'" I said as an explanation for my persistent rephrasing (developed during 20 years of doing government records requests). He laughed... but really, it's just not a laughing matter.

edit: for clarity

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/16/224731/364

Domestic Spying: They're Not Getting Data, They're Getting the Switches
by emptywheel
Tue May 16, 2006 at 07:47:31 PM PDT

Steve Soto asks why all the Telecom companies are now (after a few days and, presumably, some heated meetings with their crisis communications firms) denying the allegations in the USAT article.

All three of the companies named in the USAT story have now in varying degrees denied
the central element of the story, which is that the three companies have cooperated and turned over to the NSA millions of phone records on domestic callers without any court order or legal authorization. So with the denials, all three companies are putting the credibility of their multi-billion dollar enterprises at risk if it is found that they are engaging in word parsing here and in fact did what the USAT said they did.

Which raises several questions:

1. Did the USAT get the story correct here, and are the companies parsing words to cover the fact that the NSA "took"
the information with the company's knowledge through its own equipment tapping into the company's switches, instead of the legally-problematic act of the companies "giving" the data to the feds?

2. Was the paper set up by leaks from "sources" aiming to discredit not only the paper, but to use the resulting flame-out to bury something worse and additional coverage of the matter?

Looking back at James Risen and Eric Lichtblau's Christmas Eve article (in which they snuck in some technical data while no one was looking), I think this is a case of parsing. But I think it's not a question of giving or taking the data (as Steve speculates) so much as giving the NSA access to the switches.

snip> MUCH MORE > a very interesting diary (with comprehensive links) from emptywheel on dKos

it's that simple and what price will they pay for being found out later? Hardly a risk in getting behind the "Untouchables" . The evidence is being locked away under the same guise of national security whatever. that was recently done and it worked. The telecom lawyers wasted no time in getting behind the cover. And it is the government's coverup so later punishment for this further act of complicity needs only the kind of cautious parsing we see from some of the wiser felons.

Of course, without the evidence, this is only a theory and therefore, at this point worthless. But the telecoms getting out into the clear so quickly? Priceless.

They can parse down to flyshit if they have to.

And I suspect a bit of "coaching" from Gonzales' Justice Dept. Just to keep the stories straight.

Just add it to the warehouse of things we'll never get to see.

They knew if they were involved pretty quickly. Why take so much time to deny such devastating charges? I think they took the time to cook up a defensive PR game plan and now they're rolling it out. The telcos are full of it. They're covering up their complicity and challenging anyone to come after them. Classic.

basically stretching out the denial over 3 days instead of all of them denying it at once. The RW noise machine can then slowly drub the story to death.

Erasure statutes (at least in CT) allow arrested persons, to deny having been arrested if their arrest has subsequently been "erased" in a legal proceeding. My guess is that a legal opinion might have relied on an analysis of laws like that in analyzing the laws allowing the gov't to "classify" information.

Edit: spelling

nor was it requested they give...

last year after a bidding war with QWest. http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/01/verizon_mci.html
It may very well be that it was MCI that turned over data and/or access to the switches, whatever. Had QWest purchased MCI, it would have to be answering for MCI's actions, if this is the case.

As for BellSouth, that company is also a product of mergers and acquisitions,and strategic alliances, including one in 2005 with Yahoo.com, which was embroiled in its own surveillance scandal: http://bellsouth.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=community ; http://news.com.com/Yahoo+on+NSA+surveillance+No+comment/2100-1030_3-6040129.html

None of this will be too difficult to figure out once the matter is in discovery or before a Democratically-controlled Congressional committee.

Are phone records excluded from the Patriot Act provision that allows for secret searches of Library records for example? In that case the Librarians can't even say that someones records have been searched.

Could it be the phone companies have been told that if they admit they gave up these records they could be prosecuted under the Patriot Act?

Were they ordered? Did they OFFER them initially?

"customer phone records"

Also an odd choice of words. How about call records? How about AMA (automatic message accounting) tapes?

Telco money can buy a whole SHITLOAD of parsing.

You start off with "Deny". Then you have years and millions of dollars to tie up in the courts where you can deny, deny, deny...

What is realy happening will never be acknowledged.

here's why...

AT&T was recently bought out by SBC. SBC is a gigantic, did I say gigantic? How about a truly huge, in epic proportions sort of way, contributor to the GOP.

Why in hell should we believe them? I think they are merely covering their asses.

So, one part of the story is confirmed. It would be odd that the government would only ask Qwest and not the others.

they play us for stupid fools, yeah the chairman of Verizon didn't take fucking wheelbarrow full of data disks and drop them off at the door step of the fucking NSA headquarters. We fucking get that.

but giving the NSA access that allowed the NSA software to mine their database is a massive invasion of our privacy and is big brother on a massive scale.

rule #2, they think we are stupid