USA Today, which broke the news of the National Security Administration’s massive domestic call database in May, has an update on their story.
The gist: There’s definitely a huge calls database. And certain private companies are cooperating — just not necessarily all the ones they named. In May the paper cited Verizon, Bellsouth and AT&T as “under contract” with the NSA.
Since then, the telcos issued a variety of denials. Bellsouth’s and Verizon’s denials stood out as unequivocal. AT&T has stayed pretty much mum.
Today, USA Today reports that AT&T and Verizon subsidiary MCI did turn over records. But Bellsouth and Verizon they’re not so sure about:
Based on its reporting after the May 11 article, USA TODAY has now concluded that while the NSA has built a massive domestic calls record database involving the domestic call records of telecommunications companies, the newspaper cannot confirm that BellSouth or Verizon contracted with the NSA to provide bulk calling records to that database.
But it’s more complicated than that. The program is apparently limited to long-distance calls, so a Bellsouth customer who uses AT&T for long-distance would still be swept up. And there is still the possibilty of a third party having turned over the records.
And Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) claims, contrary to virtually all of the reporting on the program, that it “was targeted on (geographic) areas of interest, places to which calls were believed to have come from al-Qaeda affiliates and from which calls were made to al-Qaeda affiliates.”
And here’s the kicker. Despite all the talk of the vital necessity of the program, it’s something of a grand experiment:
“The database is not complete,” said another lawmaker who was briefed on the program, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. “We don’t know if this works yet.”
