szc is saying that carriers should include lost business / damaged reputation, when reporting the costs of complying with the legislation.

Say it costs Verizon $10 million to build the infrastructure to let the government listen in. Verizon could claim that the revelation of this program will cost them $10 billion in future lost business. Since the Attorney General is unlikely to approve such an expense, Verizon would be declared compliant without actually having to turn anything over.

It's an interesting loophole in theory, but probably wouldn't actually work.

[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for....

edit: the anchor tag isn't getting parsed correctly: http://bit.ly/14Gbifo

You have to show it would cost too much and the US Government refuses to pay you to do it.