What we'll never know

The headlines have screamed out from every newspaper and Web news site in the country: AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon, all indicted in print, for handing over phone records to the National Security Agency.

For five days, the story grew, starting with a USA Today report, but blossoming and growing in the fertile grounds of anti-Bell company sentiment. The same forces that are sounding an alarm about monopolist control of the Internet and encouraging the government to regulate Net neutrality were quick to chastise the phone companies for handing over their customer records with no notification to those customers, in what many perceived as a clear violation of rights of privacy.

Then BellSouth spoke up, and in a carefully worded statement said for the first time that it had not, in fact, even been asked to turn over its calling records to the NSA. The company said the delay in response was required to conduct a full internal review of what had — and hadn't — been sought or delivered.

A day later, Verizon also issued a carefully worded statement, in which it said it also hadn't turned over records of the businesses it operated prior to its acquisition of MCI.

Asked to declare its innocence — or at least that of the former SBC — AT&T chose instead to stand behind a broader disclaimer, saying it had done nothing to violate the law and had great respect for its customers' privacy.

Combine all of that with the fact Qwest proudly admitted turning down an NSA request for calling information, and the obvious conclusion seems to be that USA Today got it wrong. The NSA appears to have been interested not in domestic calling records but in international calling.

That is an assumption; however, it's a potentially dangerous one. In fact, the entire mix of customer privacy, national security and terrorism prevention is fraught with many kinds of danger for telecom network operators.

Our automated society increasingly keeps track of its citizens' activities in many ways, for many different reasons, many of them benign. Telecom operators are no different — in streamlining their network operations, they have established databases that track and can store customer information of many different types. That trend will only grow with increasing service personalization.

In this particular instance, it is the federal government's job to tell its citizens exactly what information is being collected about them, by whom and how it is being used.

Going forward, however, telecom operators of all types may want to rethink how they explain to customers what information is collected and how it is used. Transparency is a value, even in the highly charged post-Sept. 11 environment. Customers don't need encouragement to think the worst of their telecom service providers.