Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans. When government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far. note: May 22, 2006, Terkel, along with other plaintiffs, filed a suit in federal district court against AT&T to stop them from giving customer phone records to the National Security Agency without a court order.