LOOK WHO’S TALKING

In a letter last week to Congress, Verizon Communications gave the public a rare look at how it has cooperated with local, state and federal officials on tens of thousands of emergency occasions to supply customer records. Maine should consider that activity in light of Verizon New England’s assertion to the state’s Public Utilities Commission that it had not provided any customer records to the National Security Agency.

Or it should but for the Senate caving in on the issue Thursday and leaning toward giving telecommunication companies immunity from any of the suits, including Maine’s, filed as a result of suspected illegal sharing of customer records.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd has placed a hold on the bill for now, but otherwise Congress is moving ahead with this even as it becomes clear that Maine had much more to learn from the complaint against Verizon about how extensive the record sharing was and how much information was shared.

The Maine case stems from two 2006 unattributed press releases from Verizon in which it asserted that it had not shared customer information with the NSA. The Maine PUC asked that a Verizon official who would have been in a position to know swear that the press releases were accurate. It’s important to note that the PUC wasn’t looking for new information, which might violate national security. It merely wanted to confirm the information Verizon had voluntarily released. Naturally, the federal Justice Department sued Maine over the issue – inconsistency in public statements had by then become a hallmark of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and perhaps he didn’t want to be showed up by Verizon.

The recent Verizon letter to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce also noted that it had supplied Internet addresses as well as phone data and that it had been asked by the FBI to supply not only the data on all the people called by a targeted phone user, but all the people those people called. Verizon reported that it does not collect this information; the fact that the federal government wants it should tell Congress that privacy safeguards must remain firmly in place and enforced.

And the fact that Verizon was told it could not confirm its own press releases but was able to tell Congress extensive details about its levels of cooperation – carefully absent its work, if any, with NSA – suggests that states such as Maine have not received the level of cooperation they could.

Six years after 9-11, a common observation is over how much has changed in Americans’ attitudes about the need for protection. But many things haven’t changed, and among those is the right of people to be secure against unreasonable searches. Maine has its own set of telephone laws, where protecting a “right to privacy is of paramount concern to the state.”

The more that is learned about the sharing of private telephone records, the more it appears that those rights were minimized if not ignored, meaning that Congress, if it were to act as an oversight body, would have a lot of investigating to do before this issue was concluded.