[privacy] U.S. Focused on Obtaining Long-Distance Phone Data, Company Officials Indicate

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () bsf-llc com>]

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May 18, 2006

U.S. Focused on Obtaining Long-Distance Phone Data, Company Officials
Indicate 

By MATT
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/matt_richtel/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> RICHTEL and KEN
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/ken_belson/ind
ex.html?inline=nyt-per> BELSON

Government efforts to obtain data from the nation's largest phone companies
for a national security database appear to have focused on long-distance
carriers, not local ones, statements by company officials indicate.

The statements have come in the week since USA Today reported that the
National Security Agency had collected local and long-distance phone records
on tens of millions of Americans from Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T in the
aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. 

The responses by the companies suggest that the agency, in an effort to find
patterns that could identify terrorists, sought records from major
long-distance providers like the former MCI (now part of Verizon), AT&T and
Qwest, but did not ask for data on local calls. 

Technical experts said long-distance calling records could yield information
not only on the companies' own long-distance customers, but also on traffic
that the carriers connect on behalf of others, including some calls placed
on cellphones or on Internet voice connections.

But they added that unless the data was supplemented, considerable holes
would remain, since cell companies route their long-distance calls over a
variety of networks, as do providers of Internet phone service. For example,
"They wouldn't have much information about cellular calls, whether
cellular-to-cellular or cellular-to-wired calls," said Andrew Odlyzko, the
director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota and
former researcher at AT&T Labs.

Records directly turned over by the long-distance carriers might be only one
of several sources for such a database. The New York Times reported in
December that the National Security Agency had gained backdoor access to
streams of domestic and international phone and e-mail traffic with the
cooperation of telecommunications companies. 

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