The right wing of the blogosphere was all a-twitter today with news that USA Today had retracted, mostly, an earlier piece about BellSouth and Verizon providing records to the NSA without a warrant. If you’ll remember, the story caused much turmoil as the left used the opportunity to push how far the President had gone in the war against terrorism, and the right used it as just another example of the mainstream media turning a legal program into a public outrage.

Rhetoric flew at warp speed and continues to until this very day.

Today, USA Today wrote the following:

On May 11, USA TODAY reported that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of several of America’s leading telecommunications companies, had compiled a database of domestic phone call records in an effort to monitor terrorist activity.

Several days later, BellSouth and Verizon specifically denied that they were among the companies that had contracted with the NSA to provide bulk calling records.

The denial was unexpected. USA TODAY had spoken with BellSouth and Verizon for several weeks about the substance of the report. The day before the article was published, the reporter read the sections of the article concerning BellSouth and Verizon to representatives of the companies and asked for a denial before publication.

Of course, they never got that denial so absent one, the impression given was that BellSouth and Verizon did indeed participate in the program. After the storm over the exchange of that data erupted, BellSouth and Verizon both categorically denied having handed over the data unlawfully. Remember those words, because they will indeed come back later on. After further examination, the only company who denied it straight away was Qwest, and they did so convincingly and repeatedly.

Back to Verizon and BellSouth. The important part of the article is not what’s in USA Today’s “retraction.” It’s actually in the article that accompanied it:

While Verizon has denied providing call records to the NSA, it has declined to comment on whether MCI participated in the calls database program.

“The President has referred to an NSA program, which he authorized, directed against al-Qaeda,” Verizon said in a written statement May 12. “Because that program is highly classified, Verizon cannot comment on that program, nor can we confirm or deny whether we have had any relationship to it.” The statement also said the company was now “ensuring that Verizon’s policies are implemented at that entity (MCI) and that all its activities fully comply with law.”

In the weeks since the database was revealed, congressional and intelligence sources have offered other new details about its scope and effectiveness.

Okay, so despite the fact that USA Today has already seen fit to retract the story, they chose to run two very interesting quotes in the article next to it.

The first is that Verizon cannot confirm or deny their involvement. That’s pretty damned interesting because the presumption by the blogosphere seems to be that the retraction says Verizon is not in fact involved. The article says no such thing. In fact, one could reasonably assume that they are in fact giving said records up, otherwise they would flatly deny it and end the speculation altogether.

Secondly, Verizon claims that it wants to ensure MCI’s activities fully comply with the law. Again, USA Today and the right wing seem to have taken that to mean that anything they do is automatically lawful. In fact, it just means that if they’re presented with a request they perceive to be legal, they’ll honor it. It doesn’t mean they’re following the law, just following legal procedures. For example, an executive order from the President to seize (willingly or unwillingly) the records of a phone company for purposes of generating statistical patterns of users could seem legal on the surface, but it doesn’t mean it would stand up in court or be constitutional.

In other words, Verizon’s denial is a non-denial, and while I applaud USA Today for backing off something they weren’t 100% comfortable with or able to prove (albeit a month and a half later), you have to wonder why the righties are so excited about this? It hardly is the “gotcha” they’re making it out to be. If I were them, I’d stop drawing attention to it, lest more people actually bother reading the article.

Technorati Tags: verizon, bellsouth, nsa, usa today, spying, bush