One of the best-kept secrets in the American telecommunications industry was revealed in USA TODAY on Thursday and then splashed across the front page of virtually every newspaper in America Friday. But unless you paid close attention, you might easily miss the secret. The secret is something I first got an inkling of in 2004 while working for a large telecommunications company, though at the time I didn’t know what it meant or what all the implications were.

But first, the news: On Thursday, USA TODAY revealed that the National Security Agency was collecting call detail records from AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth for all of those companies’ telephone subscribers.

While AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth cooperated with the NSA in turning over call detail records, Qwest did not. According to USA TODAY, Qwest was afraid that cooperating with the program might be illegal and open the struggling company up to fines as well as legal action from customers. Qwest has not officially commented on the story.

Among smaller providers, Cox Communications said Thursday that NSA did not ask it to participate in the program.

President Bush refused to confirm or deny the story Thursday, saying that the government is not “mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans” and that “the intelligence activities I authorized are lawful” and referring to the previously revealed terrorist surveillance program of eavesdropping on international phone calls of suspected terrorists and their associates. “The government is doing everything that it can, in a lawful way, to protect innocent Americans from probable terrorist attack,” said White House spokesperson Dana Perino Thursday.

Bush said that “the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities” in his statement Thursday, but when a reporter asked, “Sir, how is collecting phone calls not an intrusion on privacy?” Bush had no response. He simply walked away from the podium.

Congress broke down mostly on party lines over the revelation, with most Republicans rushing to defend the President, and most Democrats pointing to the program as further evidence that the President has failed to act lawfully in prosecuting the so-called war on terror.

“The first move by the committee will be to ask the [phone] companies to come in,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) told his colleagues yesterday. “I am prepared to consider subpoenas” if executives do not appear voluntarily. Specter, who is Congress’s most outspoken GOP critic of warrantless wiretaps of Americans, also said he would like to bring Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales back to his panel for questions, “if it would do any good.”

“I am determined to get to the bottom of all this,” Specter said. — Washington Post

The program, which operates separately from the previously revealed terrorist surveillance program that targets international calls of suspected terrorists and their associates, collects from the telephone companies call detail records of every call made since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The data collected includes the number dialed and the time and duration of each call. NSA does not listen to the contents of the calls, though.

Such a call detail record looks basically like this. (This is an example and does not necessarily correspond to an actual telephone call.)

From: 2023531555 To: 2024561414 Date: 05/11/2006 Time: 10:30:22 am Duration: 7 min

And there I have revealed the secret I learned in 2004 and which most people will miss while following the news on this developing story. The call detail records not only include long distance calls, they include local calls. When you order a pizza, the NSA finds out about it.

The telephone companies have had a long history of denying that they even keep local call detail records. When pressed, they would grudgingly admit the records existed, but required a subpoena or court order to obtain them — even if it was the customer asking for his own records! All the while, they provided these same records to the NSA without a subpoena or court order.

While working at MCI, which merged with Verizon after I left the company, I had access to these records as part of my duties in order provisioning and repair. The records were provided to us daily by AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest for each of MCI’s telephone customers. So I knew, even as the companies denied they even kept this information, that it was available. What I didn’t know is that three of those four companies were also providing all of that data to the government. Prior to this, I assumed — as did everyone else — that the information would only be provided to the government under some sort of court order. Certainly this is the way MCI seemed to operate.

Now I can’t be sure of anything anymore, but I will say this: If you value your privacy, and you should, you should always assume the worst of the government. You’ll be right a lot more often than you’ll be wrong.

More to come on this developing story…