The telecoms’ carefully-crafted spin

May 17, 2006

Let’s take a second to review. [tag]USA Today[/tag] reported that the [tag]NSA[/tag] has created a massive [tag]database[/tag] with [tag]phone[/tag] records of nearly every call made in the United States. [tag]Qwest[/tag] did not cooperate, but acknowledged that the NSA asked the company to turn over the records and pressured Qwest pretty hard.

Over the last several days, the [tag]president[/tag], Orrin Hatch, and Trent Lott have all subtly acknowledged that the program is real. Yesterday, a senior government official confirmed to the NYT that the NSA has “access to records of most telephone calls in the United States.”

And yet, the phone companies continue to issue denials — categorical denials. [tag]BellSouth[/tag] announced this week that it “has not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA.” Yesterday, [tag]Verizon[/tag] said the same thing.

In fact, Verizon denies even being approached by the NSA about phone records. What’s the deal? Someone is obviously lying, or at a minimum, spinning furiously in an attempt to mislead.

Given the parsing, it looks like the [tag]telecoms[/tag].

[T]he statement by Verizon left open the possibility that MCI, the long-distance carrier it bought in January, did turn over such records — or that the unit, once absorbed into Verizon, had continued to do so. The company said Verizon had not provided customer records to the National Security Agency “from the time of the 9/11 attacks until just four months ago.”

In other words, Verizon’s denials seem to have a few loopholes. Is there reason to doubt the original USA Today story? Based on the telecoms’ denials so far, I’d say not yet.

One has to be very careful of what one asks.

Ask your phone company if they gave two phone numbers, datetime of the phone call, and the duration of the phone call to the NSA for any calls made from or to any phone number you or your family uses.

Don’t mention customer confidential information. Don’t mention personal information. Don’t mention easedropping. Just ask about the call information.

Believe me, they gave it up.

  • Truthiness is getting easier to spot every day now that we know what it is. I almost feel sorry for the telecoms (NOT!); because of their perfidy it seems they now can choose between: 1.) being punished by the Bush administration if they don’t cooperate with the spying and coverup, or 2.) being prosecuted for violating domestic spying rules if their cooperation becomes exposed (as it seems to be) If someone does finally ask the right question (maybe they already have!) the telecoms won’t be allowed to answer it. This needs to be resolved under oath with an investigation by a Democratic Congress.

  • The telecoms, regardless of their ammassed profits, are sorely overextended. They were among the firs to play the outsourcing-of-jobs game, they’ve not nearly enough hardware to keep up with the growing technology, and the one big thing that keeps them “alive-n-kicking” is a constant, fresh inflow of new customers. The last thing they’ll do is openly admit to commiting criminal offenses against their own customer-base; companies doing such things usually die off like a dinosaur rather quickly….

  • I just wrote about this too, there are so many ways they could be technically telling the truth by saying they didn’t “provide” the NSA with records and that an official request was never made. A $200 billion dollar lawsuit is a pretty big incentive to figure out a way to weasel out of this. Do they pretend they didn’t know? Did they provide access to their lines? Is there some backdoor way for them to give access but not “provide”?

    Also, there is this somewhat contradictory statement by Verizon:

    “As the President has made clear, the NSA program he acknowledged authorizing against al-Qaeda is highly-classified. Verizon cannot and will not comment on the program…. Again, Verizon cannot and will not confirm or deny whether it has any relationship to the classified NSA program.”

  • BellSouth announced this week that it “has not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA.”

    The operative word for me there is bulk. Does that mean they turned over all call records except those made by anyone at the White House? Pentagon? NSA, etc.

    Have they not turned over records of companies doing business with the government? Halliburton, K Street?

    Leaves a lot of wiggle room there….

  • my guess is that since the telcos are being sued over this, their attorneys said they must deny having done this, simply due to the pending law suits. this seems to be the standard response anytime any corporation is accused of doing something illegal or being sued for something.

  • It strikes me that AT&T isn’t denying anything. I believe that AT&T owns/operates much of the hardware in what we call the public telephone network.

    So is it possible that NSA can get at all of the routing info for calls in the US just thru AT&T switches? I think it might be, and then the other guys can deny turning anything over to NSA.

  • The phone companies denying the did anything wrong is probably just the first time they will plead “Not Guilty” . If this is criminal, there is no way they will admit it. Why is anyone surprised that they are parsing and dodging. They are positioning for future legal action against them and do not want any incriminating statements.

  • Has anyone here NOT been lied to by the phone companies on any issue you have ever spoken to them about????

    I think that tells all.

    God I would like to see that Texas bastard-sonofabitch-bankrobber- back-alley-assassin (in other words, a good loyal traditional Texan, just like the Texass founding fathers) who runs AT&T “get his” over this.

  • The answer is easy- Would Dubya really have gone live on TV to defend a program which didn’t exist? Of course not (unless his handlers are really whacked). Ergo, it exists. Any other comments are merely for ‘plausible deniability’.

  • I spent some years in the telephone business. No one in the business uses phrases like “bulk customer calling records.” I don’t even know what that means. The raw records spit out by telephone switches are universally referred to as ‘call data records’, or ‘call records’ or CDRs for short. When telco press releases seem to go out of their way to avoid using standard industry terminology, that should raise some eyebrows.

    Furthermore, it’s possible to get pretty much the same data without actually getting the CDR. The signalling packets sent along the networks between switches contain that information as well. It’s technically simple to let some spook come into your switch room and install patches (taps) that collect signalling data. This gives the telcos another way to claim that they didn’t “turn over” physical call records.

    The questions that need to be asked point-blank of the telcos are:

    (a) did they turn over any switch-generated CDRs?

    (b) what specifically do they mean by “customer calling records” and similar non-standard jargon they’ve been using in their statements?

    (c) did they allow the any government agency to install switchroom patches or taps for the purpose of collecting signalling packets?

  • The big phone companies have every reason to be afraid of a
    backlash against them. Having to pay out billions of dollars
    in reparations to their customers would put them out of business.
    Of course they are going to lie. They are in it in a very big way.
    There is another way to punish them for their sellout of the American
    people: dump their stock in massive amounts. They understand
    that kind of business. And in the process of doing so buy Qwest
    stock as a reward for not giving in to Bush’s demands.

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