The original USA Today story which broke the news about the NSA’s domestic calling database shenanigans says:

The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said.

This passage has been quoted by a very large number of newspaper articles and blogposts, indeed. But I have seen absolutely no discussion of what “working under contract with the NSA” means.

On the face of it, a most curious choice of words by Leslie Cauley, the USA Today journalist who broke the story. As even amateur lawyers know just from watching TV, a contract is not a contract without some consideration. Is it possible that the unholy trinity of AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth is actually getting paid for turning over our calling data to the NSA?

Cauley’s story includes one more oblique reference to the possibility of money changing hands:

The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.

However, Cauley’s story does not say, in so many words, whether these phone companies actually received payment for surreptitiously selling out their customers’ confidential calling records.

Some other newspapers, most notably the L.A. Times, have claimed the phone companies were paid.

Thursday’s story in USA Today on how the National Security Agency, our most secretive spy operation, has been paying three of the country’s biggest phone companies to turn over the record of all their customers’ calls since 9/11, was the latest installment in what has been a historically unprecedented series of newspaper reports documenting what President George W. Bush’s administration is doing in secret to prosecute what it calls “the war on terror.”
[…]
(The fact that the companies were paid to do this suggests that we’re witnessing the emergence of a new intelligence-industrial complex to take its place alongside the military-industrial one against which Dwight D. Eisenhower fruitlessly warned.)

But they put these words in Cauley’s mouth, and Cauley never spoke them.