Does anyone else get the impression that Verizon and BellSouth are talking out of both sides of their mouth? Both companies are denying that they ever received requests from the NSA to fork over their customer call records, much less submitted said records. Yet both companies are refusing to comment further on the matter, citing national security issues. How can national security considerations apply to a situation that ostensibly never occurred?

There are legitimate reasons to cite national security; there are intelligence programs that require secrecy and the implicit silent cooperation of companies like the telcos to be successful. But that justification can only apply to a program that actually exists or an action that actually occurred. Yet somehow BellSouth and Verizon seem to feel they can throw up the shield of national security to protect a classified government project they deny ever existed. BellSouth and Verizon may have nothing to hide, but they certainly act like they're hiding something.

National security seems to becoming a catch-all excuse for the telcos to avoid discussing an embarrassing topic. What's worse, they're using national security as a means of public manipulation. Verizon and BellSouth emerged from their cocoons of silence to make a self-serving statement, only to disappear immediately behind the veil of national security. It may serve those carriers' purposes today, but if it turns out that Verizon and BellSouth are actually complicit in an overall call-mining program, their statements will hurt them far more than if they chose to remain quiet.