PRIVACY ON THE LINE

In its response to a request that the Maine Public Utilities Commission look into telephone surveillance, Verizon will say only that it can neither confirm nor deny its participation with the federal government in such a program. And, anyway, it says, the issue is classified so the PUC doesn’t have the authority to investigate.

This is precisely the problem with the possibility of the National Security Agency conducting, without external oversight, an extensive mapping of phone calls made within the United States. No one in a position to demand oversight – Congress – will take a firm hand in this, and no one outside government is said to be allowed to know. It is also why the PUC should pursue, to the extent it can, an investigation into whether the privacy of Maine calls has been invaded and how telephone equipment in Maine might have been used or altered to that end.

These oversight questions should be answered on a federal level, but the Bush administration has concluded that court warrants aren’t required and Congress cannot even decide whether it wants its members to know what is going on. Complainants, in this case led by former PUC staff member James Cowie of Portland, have nowhere else to turn but to the state level.

Mr. Cowie began a series of e-mail exchanges with Verizon over this issue well before a story earlier this month in USA Today described a broad program of government surveillance through the phone companies. Those companies largely have denied supplying call lists to the NSA, but the question, in what amounts to a guessing game over what the phone companies might be doing at the administration’s behest, is whether they have allowed NSA to monitor calls and e-mails to search for patterns that the agency could find interesting.

Why they might be interesting likely has to do with the fight against terrorism, or maybe not. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was clear Sunday in saying the government would not hesitate to track telephone calls made by reporters as part of a criminal leak investigation. Counterterrorism agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it was revealed late last year, have been collecting a wide range of information about a variety of groups that might oppose administration policies.

A PUC investigation could begin with an informal enquiry to discover whether there is any basis for a complaint: Is such a surveillance program in effect in Maine? Does it affect the privacy of telephone subscribers, of which state statute says, “protection of this right to privacy is of paramount concern to the state”?

The PUC may not get far in this case, but at the very least it would establish what abilities the state has to protect the privacy of its residents. Certainly it shouldn’t accept “neither confirm nor deny” as an adequate response to a serious question.