This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law.—Jonathan Turley, Professor of Constitutional Law, George Washington University
As the nation prepares for a period in American history in which the President is actually having sex with his wife (and no one else) in the White House, a period in which real family values are on glorious public display—tastefully so, ABC News is reporting that
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
Two whistleblowers, Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk, have come forward to let the public know how the current administration honors military service: by eavesdropping on intimate conversations between spouses separated by tours of duty:
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.
And the response of US Intelligence officials? Hey, goes with the territory guys!
Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance.”
(ABC is promising more to come on World News Tonight and Nightline)
Glenn Greenwald has more at Salon.com:
The two NSA whistleblowers, Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk, were interviewed by ABC News’ Brian Ross. Kinne said that “US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and ‘collected on’ as they called their offices or homes in the United States.” He also said his co-workers “were ordered to transcribe these calls.” Faulk told Ross: ”when one of my co-workers went to a supervisor and said: ’but sir, there are personal calls,’ the supervisor said: ‘my orders were to transcribe everything’.” He said that the intercepted calls included highly personal and intimate conversations and even phone sex.
Talk about diddling around on the taxpayers' dime, whistleblower Kinne laments:
the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack.
“By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it’s almost like they’re making the haystack bigger and it’s harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody,” she said. “You’re actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security.”
Hardly surprising, any of this, but refreshing to see the story get MSM attention. Wouldn't it be easier, and cheaper, just to get these guys "professional help"--in the form of paid hookers to service them so they can use our tax dollars actually doing their jobs?