BellSouth Denial - How Complete?
Yesterday, BellSouth issued a statement denying they have a contract with the NSA to provide its customers calling data to the spy agency and also denying that it turned over calling records in bulk.
There has been much speculation in the last several days about the role that BellSouth may have played in efforts by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other governmental agencies to keep our nation safe.
As a result of media reports that BellSouth provided massive amounts of customer calling information under a contract with the NSA, the Company conducted an internal review to determine the facts. Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA.
BellSouth has built a successful business because of the trust that our customers have placed with us. We will continue to take our obligations to our customers seriously.
Note that BellSouth doesn't explicitly rule out the possibility that it provided the NSA with access to its phone record database; it just says it never turned over records in bulk. They deny a contract exists, but don't explicitly say there's no agreement or memorandum of understanding.
UPDATE: It seems that my nitpicking clearly was excessive.† Jeff Battcher, the Vice President of BellSouth Corporate
Communications, called me back and emphasized that BellSouth has not given the NSA access to its database nor a copy of their database.† "We have not provided any hook into our database or any other conduit to the NSA," Battcher said.
The company hasn't made a decision as to whether it will ask USA Today for a retraction, according to Battcher.
END UPDATE
For instance, the late December Los Angeles Times story about AT&T's database of call records (a massive database comprising 312 terabytes of information and 1.88 trillion records) says that the NSA has a "direct hookup" to the database.
That's different from providing bulk records to the NSA.
That doesn't mean the USA Today's story that the NSA was building the world's largest database using these records are wrong.† The NSA could be building a distributed database, that would allow its computers to search through multiple, geographically distinct databases as if they were a single one.
While that is harder to build than a single database, that structure has the advantage of not having to copy immense amounts of data from one database to another and solves the problem of keeping databases synced (for instance, if AT&T discovered an error, changed a phone record in its database after having turned over a copy of the database to the NSA, how do make sure the change gets propagated to the new database).
That might be nit-picking and certainly doesn't prove anything, but as we've seen with statements from the Administration, you have to parse statements very closely, with particular attention paid to definitions and tenses.
I may be completely wrong here, but the USA Today put its credibility on the line with this story, so I'm inclined to look very closely at any denial by the companies allegedly involved.
I've put in a call to BellSouth for clarification and will update once I hear back from them.
Tags: nsa, bellsouth, daytona, nitpickyparsingofpublicstatements