Telecoms may face trouble over phone records

By Seattle Times news services

WASHINGTON — Phone companies that shared their call records with the government may have violated federal law and could be on the hook for billions of dollars in civil liability, some of the nation's top experts in telecommunications law said Friday.

That's because Congress made it illegal 20 years ago for telephone companies and computer-service providers to turn over to the government records showing who their customers had dialed or e-mailed.

The information in those records enables U.S. intelligence agencies to track who calls whom and when, but does not include the contents of conversations.

The law doesn't make it illegal for the government to ask for such records. Rather, it makes it illegal for phone companies to divulge them.

"I would not want to be the general counsel of one of these phone companies," said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and a former Justice Department lawyer who has worked on electronic surveillance.

In the first legal action to result from the disclosure that the National Security Agency may have obtained the calling records of tens of millions of Americans, two New Jersey public-interest lawyers filed a suit Friday demanding up to $5 billion from telecommunications giant Verizon.

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