A BellSouth spokesperson has denied reports that the company had agreed to turn over phone call records to the National Security Agency.
“We have no contract with the NSA and we have not turned over any customer information to the NSA,” said Jeff Battcher, BellSouth’s vice president of corporate communications, in an interview with eWEEK on May 16.
Battcher said that Atltanta-based BellSouth spent several days investigating reports in USA Today that the company had agreed to turn over virtually all its customer calling data to the NSA, the government’s signals intelligence organization in Fort Meade, Md.
Click here to read more about the NSA’s secret collection of phone call records.
“BellSouth is a large corporation. [We] have over 65000 employees, we operate in 9 states,” Battcher said, explaining the delay in making the announcement, “we wanted to make sure that somewhere, sometime, this didn’t happen. We’re confident that this did not happen.”
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