USA Today clarifies

Much of the energy behind civil liberties criticisms of the Bush administration's domestic spying programs came from the big USA Today story in May. In that story, the newspaper quoted high-level sources in the telecommunications industry that said ATT&T, Verizon and BellSouth had cooperated with the NSA to create a massive database of customer calling information without warrants. Yesterday the paper clarified, saying that they could not support the allegation that Verizon and BellSouth participated in the program. Evidently the jury is still out on AT&T. The article in yesterday's paper quotes a number of members of Congress involved in investigating the allegations.

While I'm pleased that the complicity of the phone companies wasn't as broad as it first seemed, the whole thing just again comes down to a single issue: if the Bush administration had simply followed the law set out under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), none of this would have been an issue. It's a government that has no respect for the separation of powers inherent in our Constitution that has created this problem for the phone companies and the American people.