{"id":7425,"date":"2006-05-16T12:29:17","date_gmt":"2006-05-16T16:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7425"},"modified":"2006-05-16T12:29:17","modified_gmt":"2006-05-16T16:29:17","slug":"did-bellsouth-cooperate-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/did-bellsouth-cooperate-or-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Did BellSouth cooperate or not?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll readily admit I’m confused by this<\/a>.<\/p>\n

BellSouth Corp. yesterday denied it gave customer calling records to the National Security Agency en masse, contradicting a newspaper report that said it did so along with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. to help the government track suspected terrorists.<\/p>\n

“As a result of media reports that BellSouth provided massive amounts of customer calling information under a contract with the NSA, the company conducted an internal review to determine the facts,” the country’s third-largest telephone company said in a statement.<\/p>\n

“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 Atlanta company added.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The denial seems to suggest that the USA Today article that broke this story is mistaken. So, what does USAT have to say about this<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Last Thursday, USA TODAY reported that the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon, people with direct knowledge of the program said. […]<\/p>\n

USA TODAY first contacted BellSouth five weeks ago in reporting the story on the NSA’s program. The night before the story was published, USA TODAY described the story in detail to BellSouth, and the company did not challenge the newspaper’s account<\/i>. (emphasis added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, BellSouth essentially acknowledged the story last week, after having five weeks to review the company’s policies. Yesterday, however, BellSouth explained that it doesn’t have a “contract” with the NSA on this and hasn’t “provided bulk customer calling records.” Is this a situation in which BellSouth wants to play semantics games over the meaning of the word “contract”?<\/p>\n

Maybe BellSouth wants to steer clear of the FCC<\/a>.
\n<\/p>\n

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the telephone industry, should open an investigation into whether the nation’s phone companies broke the law by turning over millions of calling records to the government, an FCC commissioner says. […]<\/p>\n

“There is no doubt that protecting the security of the American people is our government’s No. 1 responsibility,” Commissioner Michael J. Copps, a Democrat, said in a statement Monday. “But in a digital age where collecting, distributing and manipulating consumers’ personal information is as easy as a click of a button, the privacy of our citizens must still matter.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First, the public disgust, then the sweeping lawsuit, then the inevitable congressional hearings, then the FCC. Somewhere, some Qwest executives are smiling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll readily admit I’m confused by this. BellSouth Corp. yesterday denied it gave customer calling records to the National Security Agency en masse, contradicting a newspaper report that said it did so along with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. to help the government track suspected terrorists. “As a result of media reports that BellSouth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}