FCC To Investigate Phone Companys?

This story reports an FCC commissioner is calling for an investigation, but doesn't make it clear if he has the authority to start one.

The Federal Communications Commission should investigate whether phone companies are violating federal communications law by providing calling records to the National Security Agency as part of an anti-terrorism program, an FCC commissioner said Monday.

"There is no doubt that protecting the security of the American people is our government's No. 1 responsibility," Commissioner Michael J. Copps, a Democrat, said in a statement. "But in a digital age where collecting, distributing and manipulating consumers' personal information is as easy as a click of a button, the privacy of our citizens must still matter."

USA Today reported last week that AT&T Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. began turning over tens of millions of phone records to the NSA after the spy agency requested the records shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The paper reported that the NSA is building a massive call databank to analyze calling patterns.

The telecommunications company Qwest said it refused to cooperate with the NSA after determining that doing so would violate privacy law.

BellSouth came out with a statement denying they were involved.

BellSouth said yesterday that it had not shared customer calling records with the National Security Agency, denying a report last week that it was among three major telephone companies to have done so.

BellSouth, the country's third-largest local phone company, said that after an internal review it had found no evidence that it had even been contacted by the agency.

"From the review we conducted, we cannot establish any link between BellSouth and the N.S.A.," Jeff Battcher, the company's spokesman, said in an interview. "We wouldn't have made this bold statement if we weren't confident about this."