Strange.  Both BellSouth and Verizon are denying they gave telephone records to the NSA, as USA Today reported last week.

Is it word-parsing or lying on the part of the telecoms, or did USA Today simply get the story wrong?  And why has AT&T remained silent?  And if the story is incorrect, why did it take Bellsouth and Verizon so long to deny it (suffering blows to their stock)?

I suspect, as do others, that the denials are merely word-parsing: the telecomes didn’t actually "provide data", but they allowed the NSA to have access to internal switches from which the data could be obtained.