A Personal Intrusion
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.
Intercept operators allege the NSA is listening to citizens’ phone calls….“These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,” said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.
Kinne described the contents of the calls as “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”…
The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other’s allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program.
“There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect,” said President Bush at a news conference this past February.
But the accounts of the two whistleblowers, which could not be independently corroborated, raise serious questions about how much respect is accorded those Americans whose conversations are intercepted in the name of fighting terrorism….
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.
ABC News and gLenn Greenwald, who asks:
(1) There is one reason and one reason only these abuses occurred: because George Bush broke the law — committed felonies — by ordering the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants.
(2) While the extent of the abuses disclosed here is substantial — “hundreds of Americans”; journalists, Red Cross and aid workers; military officers speaking to their friends and families — these disclosures are from only two relatively low-level individual NSA linguists at one NSA facility in Georgia. If just these two individuals are aware of this level of abuse, just imagine what the true extent of the abuses is — both quantitatively (how many innocent Americans had their conversations eavesdropped on?) and qualitatively (who, beyond journalists and aid workers, were listened to?).
(3) Most disturbing here is that these calls were not merely surveilled, but were recorded and transcribed. In whose custody are these recordings and transcripts and what was done with them?
(4) This was not the work of rogue employees or bad apples. Note that Faulk specifically said that the abuses were brought to the attention of NSA supervisors — the ones whom the Bush administration has repeatedly claimed were adequate substitutes for FISA judges in deciding who should be surveilled — and those supervisors said that they were ordered to transcribe the calls in question.
(5) These abuses aren’t merely grotesque invasions of privacy and civil liberties, though they obviously are that. Independently, surveillance abuses undermine genuine counter-terrorism efforts and national security interests in the extreme. If NSA agents are listening in on the calls of innocent Americans, including journalists and aid workers — including their intimate calls and even their “phone sex,” as Faulk said — then that means they’re not listening in on actual terrorist suspects.
I’m going to get a little personal here. As my readers know, I have a child with a woman from Canada, and we routinely make international calls to each other to talk about all sorts of highly personal, private matters: our son’s health for example; our income and child support obligations; debates about custody and visiting arrangements. It’s nobody’s business but our own, and thanks to George Bush, crypto-fascists like Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-Verizon), and local stooges Patrick Murphy, Boob Casey, and Arlen Specter, my private conversations may not have been so private after all.
The intrusion is actually worse than simply matters having to do with our kid. Melissa and I didn’t break up until August 2005, when Sam was nearly 2 years old. From late 2003-the end of 2005, we tried to maintain a long-distance relationship, and like these guys in the Green Zone and the Red Cross calling their wives, we had PLENTY of dirty-talk. I ask you: who knows how many of us have had our calls listened to and transcribed, and who knows which countries they’re wiretapping?
That was our personal private business, and it had nothing to do with terrorism. Personally, I feel violated and disrespected: there is absolutely no probable cause suggesting I’m involved with terrorism, but thanks to a bunch of authoritarian Nazi Republicans and cowering quisling Democrats, not only has wiretapping (including email) without a warrant become the law of the land, all lawsuits dealing with said wiretapping were dismissed this past July, by Congressional usurpation of the judiciary’s role.
Thanks a lot you fucking assholes.
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October 9th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
[...] Brendan wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptPersonally, I feel violated and disrespected: there is absolutely no probably cause suggesting I am a terrorist, but thanks to a bunch of authoritarian bNazi/b Republicans and cowering quisling Democrats, not only has wiretapping b…/b [...]