BellSouth Wants Story Retractions

BellSouth Corp., the nation's third-largest telephone company, yesterday took a further step to distance itself from reports that it gave domestic calling records to the National Security Agency, demanding that USA Today retract parts of a story that disclosed the program.

The move by the Atlanta-based company, which faxed a letter to USA Today and the paper's parent, Gannett Co., follows a series of carefully worded statements from the major phone companies that privacy advocates said contained significant loopholes.

A USA Today spokesman said the paper was reviewing BellSouth's letter and would respond. On Tuesday the paper said it was confident of its coverage.

On May 11, the newspaper reported that the nation's three largest telephone companies -- AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth -- provided domestic calling records for tens of millions of Americans to the government under a contract with the NSA to help track suspected terrorists.

"BellSouth is now insisting that USA Today retract the false and unsubstantiated statements that it made in regards to our company," said BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher, noting that his company on Monday said its preliminary review found that it had no contract with the NSA and that it had not provided customer data en masse to the intelligence agency.

Since the USA Today report appeared, the White House has neither confirmed nor denied that it sought calling records on a mass scale to track suspected terrorists.

Privacy advocates believe statements from the companies leave open the possibility that they may have provided calling data to the government, even if they did not do so under a contract with the NSA as the USA Today story said.

"The story came out in USA Today . . . and then all this dancing starting, which doesn't give people reason to believe it wasn't true," said Mary J. Culnan, a professor at Bentley College and a privacy expert. "These kind of carefully worded press releases where people just don't flat out say 'We didn't do it' -- I think that's why people continue to be suspicious."

In its denial on Monday, BellSouth did not address whether it might have provided such records outside of a contract or to an agency other than the NSA, but the BellSouth spokesman said it had not. "To the best of our review, we have not provided any bulk or wholesale customer calling records to any governmental agency," Battcher said. "People are thinking we are trying to be cute and trying to mince words here and we're really not."

In a statement issued by Verizon on Tuesday, the company denied that its local and mobile phone businesses had turned over customer calling records to the NSA but did not address whether MCI Corp., the long-distance company it bought in January, may have done so.

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, this week wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin asking the agency to investigate whether data were improperly released by the telephone carriers.

"The accounts that have been provided by some of the phone companies regarding their involvement in the NSA program have hardly resolved the matter," Rotenberg wrote. He said Verizon's statement "says that the company did not provide customer phone records to the NSA from certain businesses under the control of Verizon but also leaves open the question of other means by which the company may have provided customer information to the agency."

While Verizon did not address MCI's actions, it denied that there are loopholes in its statement about the rest of Verizon.

"The statement was categorical. Verizon had no involvement in the program. It did not provide any records directly or indirectly," said Verizon spokesman Peter Thonis.