* Carriers deny handing over call records to the NSA
Is your telephone company engaging in spy activity? More specifically, spy activity on you?
The report from USA Today, that AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth are in cahoots with the National Security Agency (NSA) in a domestic spy program, is truly troubling. The carriers are organizations we entrust with our privacy when making calls to and from our homes and workplaces.
The USA Today report alleges that AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon, in an effort to combat terrorism, handed over customer call records to the NSA without securing the appropriate legal measures, such as warrants. All three denied the accusations – AT&T said it cooperates with national security requests within the limits of the law.
Beyond that, they wouldn’t comment on matters of “national security.” BellSouth, however, is demanding that USA Today retract the story.
Qwest declined NSA’s request for call records after 9/11, when then CEO Joe Nacchio was busy instead allegedly perpetrating an accounting fraud at the company.
Congress is looking into the activity and civil liberties organizations are lining up the lawyers and lawsuits.
Though the Bush administration insists the surveillance is legal and that it does not eavesdrop on conversations among ordinary Americans, this event does smack of McCarthyism in its ugliest form: the apparent circumvention of legal avenues to engage in domestic spying on innocent Americans using a trusted utility to communicate with family, friends, loved ones and business partners in an effort to pinpoint un-American activity.
And irrespective of the phone companies’ reported complicity, it’s another example of the extremes the Bush administration will go to to excuse itself from a multiyear inability to track down and capture the one individual responsible for our collective paranoia.
