Phone Companies May Face Legal Trouble Over Phone Records

The Seattle Times reports:

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.

Hopefully,the lawsuits will take care of this situation.