(Via RedState) The Washington Post ran an article late last week that adds a furth convolution to the NSA phone number database story.
“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.[...]
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.
Curiouser and curiouser. It’s kind of disturbing that we’ve reached a point where so many people so easily believed such an apparently erroneous story.
True, I also was (and still am) willing to believe the story, but we’ve already established that I’m a bit of a paranoid cook. 