If you’re like me and still on pins and needles wondering why Qwest turned down the NSA and refused to hand over phone call records, in other words you didn’t bother reading why in the original USA Today article, thankfully the New York Times repeats the reasoning.

The telecommunications company Qwest turned down requests by the National Security Agency for private telephone records because it concluded that doing so would violate federal privacy laws, a lawyer for the telephone company’s former chief executive said today.

Yeah, because I was really wondering if things had changed in a day and Qwest decided legal reasons were not why they didn’t work with the NSA. From the original USA Today article:

According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

What’s odd is that USA Today chose to even give this item in the news anonymous protection. The Qwest legal team issued a press release today so it’s not as if Qwest cared about being silent. Did the USA Today bother even asking Qwest directly why they chose not to participate? If so, did they just give them anonymous protection for the hell of it?

As I wrote yesterday, there will be several spinoff stories regarding this one piece of old news. “How coud it be old,” you ask. The New York Times covered this exact program months ago to much less fanfare. The New York Times apparently feels they should play catchup to cover a story that ‘broke’ months after their own newspaper broke the same story. Confused? You shouldn’t be. It’s the media business and in today’s world of reporting, newsworthy and timeliness are subjective words.

The New York Times piece is yet another of these spinoffs, but what is rather interesting judging from some of the comments we hear come from Capital Hill is that Senator Hagel says the program has “been briefed to the appropriate members of Congress.” Yes, and so too was the NSA wiretapping and just about everything else other members of Congress want to play dumb about.

The drum beat continues, but is anyone around to care?

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