Phone Record Confusion

I don't have time to write much of anything substantive tonight, but in light of my previous posts commenting on the USA Today phone records story, I feel compelled--in the interests of fairness--to highlight the fact that both Verizon and BellSouth have now issued official statements denying that they provided any information to the NSA. Steve Soto at the Left Coaster has a good rundown of the companies' statements.

The USA Today, however, has not backed off their story or issued any corrections. And the New York Times today cites sources which seem to back up the USA Today's central claim:

A senior government official, granted anonymity to speak
for publication about the classified program, confirmed on
Friday that the security agency had access to records of
most telephone calls in the United States.

The Times story seems to hint at a resolution to this conundrum:

In their hunt for terrorists, spy agencies could find it more
efficient to focus on long-distance calls, rather than local ones;
long-distance call records would include not just information
about cross-country traffic but also about international
communications, said Tony Rutkowski, vice president for
regulatory affairs and standards for VeriSign, a company that
offers security services for Internet and telephone operations.

"The odds are that somebody calling a neighbor is not going to
be a communication pattern of interest," he said. By ignoring
those local call records, he said, government agents "are
obviously significantly diminishing the burden" of combing
through billions of calls to find patterns that could identify a
threat.

In 2004, more than 80 percent of the 463 billion domestic
calls made in the United States were local, according to the
Federal Communications Commission. Verizon said yesterday
that "phone companies do not even make records of local calls
in most cases because the vast majority of customers are not
billed per call for local calls."

While the Bell companies have operated long-distance
divisions for years, they typically only connected calls in states
where they offer local service. To connect calls outside their
regions and overseas, they often handed off calls to long-distance
carriers like MCI, Sprint and the old AT&T.

The Times seems to be hinting that the key records are not the local call records (if those even exist) but rather the records of the long-distance carriers with whom the local companies interact. Perhaps the denials by Verizon and BellSouth reflect this distinction. We'll see. I have a feeling these questions will be sorted out in the coming days.