Questions Raised for Phone Giants in Spy Data Furor

QUESTIONS RAISED FOR PHONE GIANTS IN SPY DATA FUROR
[SOURCE: New York Times 5/14, AUTHOR: John Markoff]
A federal lawsuit was filed in Manhattan Friday seeking as much as $50 billion in civil damages against Verizon on behalf of its subscribers. The New Jersey lawyers who filed the federal suit, Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, said they would consider filing suits against BellSouth and AT&T in other jurisdictions. "This is almost certainly the largest single intrusion into American civil liberties ever committed by any U.S. administration," Mr. Afran said. "Americans expect their phone records to be private. That's our bedrock governing principle of our phone system." In addition to damages, the suit seeks an injunction against the security agency to stop the collection of phone numbers. Legal experts said Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth face the prospect of lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages over cooperation in the National Security Agency program to build a vast database of phone calling records, citing communications privacy legislation stretching back to the 1930's. The database reportedly assembled by the security agency from calling records has dozens of fields of information, including called and calling numbers and the duration of calls, but nothing related to the substance of the calls. But it could permit what intelligence analysts and commercial data miners refer to as "link analysis," a statistical technique for investigators to identify calling patterns in a seemingly impenetrable mountain of digital data. The law governing the release of phone company data has been modified repeatedly to grapple with changing computer and communications technologies that have increasingly bedeviled law enforcement agencies. The laws include the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, and a variety of provisions of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, including the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986. Wiretapping -- actually listening to phone calls -- has been tightly regulated by these laws. But in general, the laws have set a lower legal standard required by the government to obtain what has traditionally been called pen register or trap-and-trace information -- calling records obtained when intelligence and police agencies attached a specialized device to subscribers' telephone lines.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/13/washington/13phone.html

See Also --

* Lawsuit over phone records may grow
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20060515/a_nsa15.art.htm

* Phone market dominance permits two-tier Internet, NSA data mining, other abuses
http://www.oreillynet.com/etel/blog/2006/05/phone_market_dominance_permits.html

* Telecom firms distance themselves from NSA flap
http://news.com.com/Telecom+firms+distance+themselves+from+NSA+flap/2100-1028_3-6071860.html?tag=nefd.top

* Qwest Goes From the Goat to the Hero
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/technology/15link.html
(requires free registration)