'USA Today' retracts part of its phone data spying story

WASHINGTON: The daily 'USA Today' has discreetly admitted that it could not prove important elements of a May 11 story claiming that the US National Security Agency tracked the phone calls of tens of millions of AT and T, Verizon and BellSouth telephone company customers.

The story, which triggered a political firestorm over domestic spying, said the NSA launched the secret program shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks to analyse calling patterns in a bid to detect terrorist activity.

It said the plan does not involve listening to phone conversations, but consists of records of phone calls made across town or cross-country.

The companies that reportedly handed over their information -- AT and T, Verizon and BellSouth -- are the nation's largest, providing phone service to more than 200 million people.

But in a column titled 'A note to our readers' tucked inside page 2A of Friday's edition, USA Today acknowledged that it could not confirm that Verizon or BellSouth collaborated with the NSA.

"Based on its reporting after the May 11 article, USA Today has now concluded that while the NSA has built a massive domestic calls record database involving the domestic call records of telecommunications companies, the newspaper cannot confirm that BellSouth or Verizon contracted with the NSA to provide bulk calling records to that database," the note read.