ABC has an article up quoting two former NSA intercept operators stating that they would share "salacious or tantalizing phone calls" that were intercepted by the NSA. This is pretty scary information for anyone who cares about their right to privacy which is supposed to be protected by the 4th amendment.
More after the fold
Here is some quotes from the article where Faulk is talking about intercepting phone calls than sharing them with fellow operators.
Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.
"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.
Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.
"I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me," he said.
This is the type of thing people knew was probably going on when we found out about the total information awareness program by the NSA. This is why the ACLU was suing to find out exactly what calls were monitored and for what reasons. This is the information that will now not be available because of the Protect AT&T act which passed into law which gave telecom companies immunity for assisting the bush administration in violating our rights.
More from Faulk on who they were monitoring:
"We knew they were working for these aid organizations," [former Army Reserves Arab linguist Adrienne] Kinne told ABC News. "They were identified in our systems as ‘belongs to the International Red Cross’ and all these other organizations. And yet, instead of blocking these phone numbers we continued to collect on them," she told ABC News.
emphasis mine.
This is what America is turning into. We are one of the leading surveillance societies around the world.
This is what the Bush administration has turned this country into. A country where calls are intercepted by the NSA and then shared if the information is tantalizing enough. This is an administration that has absolutely no respect for the law or the constitution. One that shredded rights as often as possible with acts such as the patriot act and this warrantless surveillance program.
So tell me again why impeachment was off the table.