Today, the second telco denied accusations by the USA Today that they had provided the NSA with their customers' records.
Verizon:
Verizon Communications Inc. denied earlier media reports that it entered into a contract with the National Security Agency, providing the government office with info about its customer phone calls.
"One of the most glaring and repeated falsehoods in the media reporting is the assertion that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Verizon was approached by NSA and entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers' domestic calls," the company said in a statement Tuesday.
Verizon said it was not asked by the government agency to provide, nor did Verizon give out, customer phone records from any of its businesses, or any customer call data.
This agrees with what Bellsouth has said in regard to the USA Today article.
Bellsouth:
A day after denying that it provided bulk customer calling data to the National Security Agency, BellSouth Corp. said Tuesday it would never give any government agency such information without a subpoena or court order.
Spokesman Jeff Battcher said it took the Atlanta-based telecommunications company four days to deny claims in a USA Today story about the calling data because it wanted to make sure its review was thorough before responding.
Sorry guys. Maybe my tinfoil hat is on a little too tight, but I'm not buying it. These two articles are almost identical. If you substituted the name of each company in each article, the two articles would sound exactly the same.
These companies knew and know they are in deep trouble over this issue. They violated federal law when they gave our records to the NSA without a court order. The minimum civil penalty for such an act is $1000 per customer.
Verizon is being sued for $5 billion. Yes that is billion. $5,000 million dollars.
You're going to have to do better than the excuse of..."We're a big company so it takes a long time to find things out?"...You must think we're as dumb as Bush does. You waited a week to get your story straight with each other. Its time to quit listening to Bush and the NSA. They're just going to keep getting you in deeper trouble.
Update: As Elwood Dowd points out in the comments:
Someone seems to be lying.
It just isn't credible that the NSA asked Qwest for its records, as that company's former and current CEOs have stated, but did not ask BellSouth or Verizon.