Why did phone-records bill 'disappear'?

Might there be a connection between the apparent "disappearance" of legislation that would protect private telephone records and news that two ABC television reporters have been told that their cell-phone calling patterns are being monitored by the government.
 
It's only two dots, but …
 
On Friday, U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., was asking pointed questions in a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert regarding the "mysterious disappearance" earlier this month of legislation that would stop the sale of private telephone records over the Internet. The bill, which had cleared the Energy and Commerce Committee with unanimous bipartisan support, had been slated for an airing before the full House May 2.
 
"Yet, with no notice or explanation, H.R. 4943 summarily disappeared from the House floor schedule that day and it has not been seen or heard from since," Markey writes. "I am concerned about reports that some intelligence agency or interest had a hand in the bill's disappearance. There are rumors, as you may have heard, that the House Intelligence Committee has sought an exemption from the bill's privacy protections for 'intelligence gathering activities.' If true, this raises important questions concerning whether intelligence agencies are seeking an exemption in order to obtain phone records of Americans without due legal process as part of some future plan, or whether intelligence entities were seeking an exemption in the bill to clarify the legality of such a program because they are currently gathering such records today without clear authority."
 
Today, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito of ABC report:
 
"A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
 
" 'It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,' the source told us in an in-person conversation.
 
"ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls."
 
Maybe, maybe not. If these dots do indeed connect, it could be that the phone records in question are coming to the government not via the NSA but through more conventional means, namely the myriad online services that obtain and sell personal phone records through "pretexting" and other fraudulent schemes.
 
If true, what you've got here is one branch of government trying to step on the insects that sell private phone records … and another branch trying to declare them a protected species.