Everybody's Right & Wrong at the same time

Both Verizon & BellSouth have denied they gave the government, the National Security Agency, customer call data regarding domestic calls or that it had been asked to do so. That would be consistent with what President Bush and the administration have said. The hang up (pun intended) is with the USA Today article of May 10, "NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls". The writers of the story keep referring to phone call records, but their anonymous sources state that, "Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information." As I said in my post on May 12 (I say the N.S.A. is OK), the phone companies own the telephone numbers. Therefore it would not be difficult for the N.S.A. to create a database using telephone numbers. Obviously it would be easier if the telephone numbers were provided by long distance carriers vs. regional carriers, there would be less telephone numbers involved. The USA Today article also states that, "The agency today is considered expert in the practice of "data mining" — sifting through reams of information in search of patterns. Data mining is just one of many tools NSA analysts and mathematicians use to crack codes and track international communications.

Paul Butler, a former U.S. prosecutor who specialized in terrorism crimes, said FISA approval generally isn't necessary for government data-mining operations. "FISA does not prohibit the government from doing data mining,"

The caveat, he said, is that "personal identifiers" — such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses — can't be included as part of the search. "That requires an additional level of probable cause".

The problem is the mainstream media need for a conspiracy when there isn't one, and politicians without backbone who keep focusing on the wrong aspect of the story. They see illegal wiretapping and privacy invasions when the reality is it's legal data-mining of telephone numbers.