BellSouth Seeks Retraction Of USA Today's NSA Story
By DIONNE SEARCEY
May 18, 2006 4:30 p.m.
As lawsuits mount against BellSouth Corp., the phone company faxed a letter to USA Today demanding the newspaper retract "the faults and unsubstantiated statements" outlined in an article naming the company as having provided domestic calling records to the National Security Agency.
The letter sent Thursday to USA Today President and Publisher Craig Moon as well as the general counsel of the newspaper's parent company, Gannett Co., asks for an immediate correction of the article's characterization of BellSouth's relationship to the NSA.
According to BellSouth, the letter quotes phrasing from the May 11 article7 that describes a massive database of domestic calls that BellSouth as well as Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. provided to the NSA.
Earlier this week, BellSouth denied turning over bulk calling records to the NSA, amid uproar over the alleged role of phone companies in U.S. surveillance efforts. The Atlanta-based company also said the agency had never contacted it to provide massive amounts of information about domestic calls.
President Bush has neither confirmed nor denied that such a program exists, but said the NSA's surveillance efforts were legal and focused on terrorist suspects. "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans," he said in televised remarks.
The publicity fallout against phone companies stemming from the allegations has been harsh with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and at least one member of the Federal Communications Commission calling for answers from the companies and the filing of a handful of lawsuits claiming the companies violated customer privacy.
New York-based Verizon has also denied it was approached by the NSA or "entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers' domestic calls."
AT&T, the largest phone company in the U.S., said it doesn't allow wiretapping without a court order and hasn't given customer information to law-enforcement authorities or government agencies without legal authorization.
Joseph Nacchio, the former chief executive of Qwest Communications International Inc. who is now facing insider-trading charges, confirmed last week that he rejected a request for "access to the private telephone records of Qwest customers" from the National Security Agency in 2001.