TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: BellSouth Demands Retraction of NSA Report from USA Today

Re: BellSouth Demands Retraction of NSA Report from USA Today

Thor Lancelot Simon (tls@panix.com)
Mon, 22 May 2006 01:10:35 UTC

In article <telecom25.194.6@telecom-digest.org>, George Berger
<gberger@his.com> wrote:

>> The real question is: Can we possibly trust anything a Company says
>> anymore if national security is involved?

> In this case, I'd be more likely to believe Bell South. The incident
> has too much publicity and too many responders for Bell South to risk
> getting caught in a lie. The negative publicity and subsequent
> litigation that would most certainly follow could easily force them
> into Chapter 11, if not worse. DOJ prosecutors are salivating at the
> chance to bring one more "Rogue Corporation" to its knees and to jail
> the CEO.

Uh. Sure.

I'd just like to know whether you mean the same employees of the same
Department of Justice which went to court to kill the ACLU's lawsuit
over the same, quite likely illegal, NSA surveillance of American
citizens by asserting the state secrets privilege?

Lost in all this is, I think, the simple fact that it's entirely
possible that both what some of the telephone companies and the
whistleblowers who tattled on them are saying is true: that records of
Americans' telephone calls are in fact being provided automatically to
the NSA from within the telco's networks, and that the telcos are not,
in fact, providing those records directly to the NSA, thus giving them
a fig leaf to hide behind.

After all, all that's needed for that to be true is the involvement of
any other government agency, a single shell corporation, or a defense
contractor used as an intermediary to receive the data.

Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com

"We cannot usually in social life pursue a single value or a single
moral
aim, untroubled by the need to compromise with others." - H.L.A. Hart

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