But I wouldn’t be surprised if the legal department at USA Today is working through the weekend:
BellSouth Corp., the No. 3 U.S. local telephone company, on Thursday demanded USA Today retract claims in a story that said the company had a contract with a U.S. spy agency and turned over customers’ telephone records.
BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher denied the company had a contract with the National Security Agency and did not give access or provide call records to the spy agency as part of an effort to thwart any terrorist plots.
USA Today reported last week that the NSA has had access to records of billions of domestic calls and collected tens of millions of telephone records from data provided by BellSouth, Verizon and AT&T Inc..
“BellSouth insists that your newspaper retract the false and unsubstantiated statements you have made regarding our company,” BellSouth said in a letter to USA Today President Craig Moon and the general counsel at the newspaper’s parent company Gannett Co.