Thursday, October 9, 2008

This Is Why The Fourth Amendemenr Was Written

U.S. Officers' "Phone Sex" Intercepted; Senate Demanding Answers

By BRIAN ROSS, VIC WALTER, and ANNA SCHECTER
Oct. 9, 2008
ABC News reports that, "despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary," the NSA listens in on ordinary phone calls of US citizens overseas, and military intercept operators who work at the National Security Agency (NSA) enjoy sharing and saving recordings of US officers' pillow-talk and phone sex calls with their spouses back home.
[Intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee 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.

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."

"They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game," said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country's warrantless surveillance program.

"This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law," Turley said.

Snip

But wait there is more! ABC News also has a whistle-blower claim that the NSA was snooping on NGOs like the IRC and Doctors Without Borders.

"We knew they were working for these aid organizations," Kinne {Adrienne Kinne a NSA operative who allegedly listened in on the conversations} told ABC News. "They were identified in our systems as 'belongs to 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.

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