{"id":7433,"date":"2006-05-17T10:41:04","date_gmt":"2006-05-17T14:41:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7433"},"modified":"2006-05-17T10:41:04","modified_gmt":"2006-05-17T14:41:04","slug":"the-telecoms-carefully-crafted-spin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-telecoms-carefully-crafted-spin\/","title":{"rendered":"The telecoms’ carefully-crafted spin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s take a second to review. [tag]USA Today[\/tag] reported<\/a> 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<\/a> to turn over the records and pressured Qwest pretty hard<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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

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

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

Given the parsing<\/a>, it looks like the [tag]telecoms[\/tag].<\/p>\n

[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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/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-7433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7433","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=7433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}