Media Nation

It’s been a little more than a week since USA Today reported that the nation’s three largest phone companies turned over their customers’ calling records to the National Security Agency. Two of those companies, BellSouth and Verizon, have issued denials; now BellSouth is demanding a retraction. Is USAT’s story in tatters?

The answer, I think, is no. I suspect that USAT got much of the story right, some of it wrong, and lacks the wit and the expertise to defend itself properly. (And yes, this is different from what I said yesterday.) The Washington Post’s Arshad Mohammed, in reporting on the latest from BellSouth, offers this today:

“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.”

That sounds about right.

Perhaps USAT’s best defense is that its exclusive of last Thursday wasn’t all that exclusive. On Dec. 24, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and James Risen — the same reporters who had broken the warrantless-wiretapping story — weighed in with a meaty report that pretty much had everything USAT had, missing only the names of the phone companies. The headline: “Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report.” Lichtblau and Risen wrote:

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said….

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation….

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called “pattern analysis” on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

To my knowledge, no one has demanded that this story be retracted. You may not have bothered to read the Times on Christmas Eve, but, as you can see, it was one of the pieces for which Lichtblau and Risen won a Pulitzer. So go back and read their story now.

It looks like we’ve hit a lull in the possible unraveling of the USA Today story over whether the nation’s three largest phone companies gave their customers’ calling records to the National Security Agency. Here are a few newish developments:

• The New York Times today reports that the NSA may really have been after long-distance records, not local calls, which could explain the responses put forth by the phone companies — including the denials issued earlier this week by BellSouth and Verizon. Comment: If you’re trying to figure out from this whether USAT got it right, good luck. The Times report appears to prop up the gist of the USAT story, but the details are different from what USAT reported last week.
• Yesterday, as at least one Media Nation reader has noted, the liberal site Think Progress posted an item reporting that, on May 5, President Bush signed a memorandum that “allows the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, to authorize a company to conceal activities related to national security.” The item continues: “There is no evidence that this executive order has been used by John Negroponte with respect to the telcos. Of course, if it was used, we wouldn’t know about it.” Bolstering that is a story posted on News.com by Declan McCullagh that ominously begins: “An AT&T attorney indicated in federal court on Wednesday that the Bush administration may have provided legal authorization for the telecommunications company to open its network to the National Security Agency.” Read the whole thing. Comment: How does this relate to the USA Today story? Don’t know. But clearly it’s more evidence that the White House is contemptuous of our civil liberties and the public’s right to know what its government is doing.
• Josh Marshall has posted several times on this, and has flatly stated that BellSouth and Verizon are “lying.” How does he know? “Common sense” and a “hunch.” Well, now. I like Josh’s stuff, but I think he ought to do better than that. He also points to a commentary by Vaughn Ververs, who thinks the USAT story might be “slipping away.” Marshall disagrees with Ververs. Comment: I think Ververs might be right, but I’m not ready to walk away yet. But USAT needs to undertake a serious effort to rehabilitate its story. If it can.

This afternoon I paid a visit to my friendly Verizon Wireless store, which may or may not be providing my calling information to the National Security Agency. I had come to upgrade to a Treo 650 — an expensive proposition somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I had $100 coming toward a new phone.

Obstacle #1: The saleswoman told me that I had to choose between two Internet plans. I think they were $25 a month and $45 a month. I told her I didn’t want an Internet plan — that I intended to use my Treo as a phone and organizer, not to receive e-mail or access the Web. She seemed mildly flummoxed, but I cleared the hurdle.

Obstacle #2: The sale was nearly complete when I sought assurance that we wouldn’t be paying any more per month than we are now. No, I was told — except, of course, for the $5 a month mandatory fee that comes with my having chosen “pay as you go” Internet access. I repeated that I didn’t want any Internet access. The answer: Not an option. My answer: No sale.

I am not a Luddite. In fact, I had intended at some point to check out the possibility of adding WiFi to the Treo for occasional Internet access, à la carte or free. But I wasn’t going to pay $60 a year for something I don’t want or need. Why can’t I choose the features I want? Ridiculous.

Tom Mulvoy, a retired Boston Globe managing editor, has responded to Christopher Lydon’s essay that appears in the current CommonWealth Magazine. (Here is my earlier post on Lydon’s piece.) It makes for excellent reading, especially for those of us old enough to remember Tom Winship’s Boston Globe.

And bloggers take note: CommonWealth has added a feature making it possible to generate an open link to every feature on the Web site, thus bypassing the free but occasionally frustrating registration procedure. Look for “Link to this page registration-free,” in the upper right. (Disclosure: Yes, I’m a CommonWealth contributor.)

James Wood, writing in what appears to be a freely available essay on The New Republic’s Web site, shows that he gets Stephen Colbert.

I disagree with Wood’s observation that the transcript of Colbert’s appearance at White House Correspondents Association Dinner is better than the video — I thought actually watching Colbert was what brought his words to life. But Wood is dead-on in observing that humor was just one of the things that Colbert was up to that night, and certainly not the most important thing. He writes:

Obviously enough, this is designed not to amuse, but to wound, to goad, to irritate. It is not comedy; the discourse has moved location, from the funhouse to the church, and it has become preachy and a little earnest. We are in the realm of the blogosphere. Again and again, Colbert chides the MSM in much the way that the alternative press does: “John McCain, John McCain, what a maverick! Somebody find out what fork he used on his salad, because I guarantee you, it wasn’t a salad fork. This guy could have used a spoon! There’s no predicting him.” Actually, this last jibe is pretty funny, and it neatly pops both John McCain’s ballooning self-regard and the tedious reverence of the establishment media.

And, pleasingly, the MSM have responded with delicious displays of their own inability to read.

Wood follows that up with a nice poke at Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (see this and this). Good stuff.

USA Today may have a serious problem on its hands. This hasn’t reached Jack Kelley proportions, and it may not. But a week after the paper broke a story alleging that the nation’s three largest telephone companies were handing over their customers’ calling lists to the National Security Agency, the paper’s editors must find themselves desperately hoping that it doesn’t all fall apart.

We now know that two of the three phone companies — BellSouth and Verizon — have issued firm, unambiguous denials. Here’s the item I posted on BellSouth yesterday, with relevant links. The Verizon denial is reported today by the Washington Post here and the New York Times here. Both papers claim that USA Today might have gotten it right with respect to Verizon if it turns out that a recently acquired subsdiary, MCI, had been cooperating with the NSA. Well, yes. But clearly the burden of proof has shifted from the defendant to the plaintiff: USA Today has to offer some evidence that its story is true. Now.

USA Today’s account today offers this:

Long-distance calls placed by BellSouth and Verizon subscribers can traverse the networks of other carriers who collect a variety of information for billing purposes. Verizon’s statement leaves open the possibility that the NSA directed its requests to long-distance companies, or that call data was collected by means other than Verizon handing them over, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.

That strikes me as a pretty thin reed on which to be hanging such an important story. Moreover, USA Today has clearly lost control, given that it’s pointing to the speculative musings (“leaves open the possibility,” indeed) of another news organization in order to keep its exclusive alive. (I was not able to locate the AP story in my rather cursory search, and am relying on USA Today’s description. Perhaps not a smart move on my part.)

Take a look at the Verizon statement USA Today included in its original story last Thursday: “We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers’ privacy.” Not exactly confirmation, is it?

And in a preview of coming attractions, here’s what AT&T said in that same story: “We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law.” It wouldn’t exactly be a surprise if AT&T issues a denial later today.

We are dealing with some incredibly sensitive material, and it’s hard to know exactly what to think. Given the stakes, it’s possible that USA Today got the story more or less right, and that BellSouth and Verizon have issued denials on hypertechnical grounds that we’re not in a position to evaluate.

But given that the original story was based on unnamed sources who may or may not know what they’re talking about, and given that the paper grasps at that straw from the AP today, it doesn’t look good.

Update: I just found this on Romenesko. Think Harry Jaffe might like to have it back?

Someone who is or claims to be the wife of the guy who registered the domain name christymihos.net posts a long, long note to Universal Hub. Here’s my earlier item, which has all the relevant links. Commenters seem unimpressed, given that the Christy Mihos campaign has been accused of threatening Hub Politics, the blog where this all started.

With Media Nation’s unerring sense of finding the most trivial aspect of a trivial item, I am pleased to report that this defender of Mihos’ honor confirms my earlier hunch that christymihos.net did not mirror the official christy2006.com site but, rather, merely forwarded people to it.

It feels almost uncivic-like (oof — not quite a word, I suppose) to write a blog in New England and to have said nothing about the flood. So I’ll just say this: Media Nation has been very lucky. We’re on high ground. Barely a drop has entered our cellar. Our roof has sprung a tiny leak next to the chimney, which is dripping into my son’s closet. But we won’t know until things have dried out thoroughly and there’s another, normal rainstorm before we’ll be able to tell whether we have a real problem or not.

The images on television have been absolutely startling. Peabody Lake, formerly Peabody Square, is the lead image in both the national and city editions of the New York Times. Here in the Flooded North, our town’s schools were closed yesterday, and the high school was being used as a shelter for those who were displaced — something I’ve never heard of happening here before. But this is not a river town, and by midday yesterday the worst appeared to be over.

Media Nation’s best wishes go out to everyone who’s been affected by the Great Flood of 2006.

A potentially significant problem has arisen with USA Today’s big story of last Thursday, in which it was reported that the nation’s three largest phone companies have allowed the National Security Agency to track their customers’ calls. One of those companies, BellSouth, now says it did not participate. Here is BellSouth’s statement:

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.

The Washington Post covers the story here; the New York Times here.

What does USA Today have to say about this? Reporter Leslie Cauley, who wrote the original story, reports:

USA TODAY first contacted BellSouth five weeks ago in reporting the story on the NSA’s program. The night before the story was published, USA TODAY described the story in detail to BellSouth, and the company did not challenge the newspaper’s account. The company did issue a statement, saying: “BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority.”

In an interview Monday, BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher said the company was not asking for a correction from USA TODAY.

Asked to define “bulk customer calling records,” Battcher said: “We are not providing any information to the NSA, period.” He said he did not know whether BellSouth had a contract with the Department of Defense, which oversees the NSA.

That is one convoluted passage. It’s hard to know what to think. Is BellSouth relying on loopholes in its denials? Or is USA Today making it appear that way in order to preserve its story? And what does it mean that the company at first “did not challenge the newspaper’s account”? How much time did USA Today give the company to respond? Was the official (or officials) contacted even in a position to know?

Frankly, the company’s contention, in its statement, that it had to conduct an internal review before it could give a definitive answer, strikes me as believable. Cauley does write that she contact BellSouth five weeks before the story appeared, but we don’t know the substance of that contact. As for describing the story in detail “[t]he night before it was published,” that more or less speaks for itself.

We need answers.

The New York Times today offers a hilarious front-page juxtaposition. My former Boston Phoenix colleague Mark Leibovich reports on why Secretary of the Treasury John Snow has long thought to have been a goner. The reason? The economy is just so gosh-darn good, yet the public doesn’t seem to realize it. Leibovich writes:

“This is an economy that by any statistical measure would be the envy of any administration of any party,” said John J. Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, who has known the secretary since Mr. Snow’s days as chief executive of the CSX Corporation. “Yet the public perception of the economy is a poor one.”

Nearby, though, is a story by Robin Pogrebin on how high gasoline prices are affecting working-class families. The top:

MAIMI BEACH, May 12 — Giving up the occasional rib-eye steak hasn’t been the hardest part for Ana Lopez, although her husband is a red-meat man.

More difficult are having to tell her 11-year-old son that he cannot go to the movies, and swearing off Sunday visits to her sister in Pembroke Pines or to her brother in Miami Lakes. These are the sacrifices required now that it costs $60 to fill her aging Toyota 4Runner.

Ms. Lopez, 48, who lives in the outlying suburb of West Kendall, must conserve every gallon possible for the 60-mile round trip to and from her job as the housekeeping manager at the Bentley Hotel in Miami Beach. “There is not enough money to spend for gas,” she said. “You have to think about it: If I go to see my friend, I won’t have enough gas to work tomorrow.”

What an ingrate Ana Lopez is! If only the Bush administration had a treasury secretary who could properly explain the good news, she would realize how wonderful everything is.