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Pillow Talk
PILLOW TALK....Does the NSA intercept telephone calls between Americans? Of course not! That's against the law. Unless, of course, you happen to be an American in one of the NSA's "areas of intercept" when you call home. ABC News talks today to a couple of NSA whistleblowers who say that eavesdropping on Americans was commonplace:
"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....."We knew they were working for these aid organizations," 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.
And there's this from a former Navy Arab linguist named David Murfee Faulk:
"Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another," said Faulk.....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.
The official NSA response is to stay mum. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) promises to investigate. Stay tuned.
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No one could have predicted that the Bush/Cheney Administration would misuse the extraordinary powers the Congress has granted them in the name of national security.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) promises to investigate.
I won't hold my breath.
Hey, if Jay Rockefeller is on the case, you know we'll get to the bottom of this. Heads are gonna roll, baby!
If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
Right?
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
Right?"
--Tom Stewart
Tom, that's what the Jews who were "relocated" to Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau said at first.
Well of course they eavesdropped on Americans. This is one of the reasons people were opposed to this in the first place.
I thought this was a given. Good to have it back in the public eye, but it's not surprising or a shocking revelation for those who were paying attention.
Watch "The Lives of Others" for a compelling take on a police state.
The land line phone system was sold as being secure and it would take a court order for a wire tap. The internet was never secure although it, too, was sold as potentially secure. Satellite phones are part of the internet. If you want security, you'll need a voice scrabbler at both ends. (and that will bring government attention to your phone call) It's your falsely based expectations of security that have been dashed. If big brother can listen, he will listen. There's no stopping your big brother now.
Jello Jay will issue a stern press release and congratulate himself on a job well done by cashing yet another huge check from the telecom industry.
ABC is claiming this as exclusive, but Amy Goodman had this months ago.
Isn't Brain Ross one of the ABC-ers with a checkered history?
Jay Rockefeller is furious about this. He thought for sure he'd made this sort of thing legal already, and now he's going to have to work his ass of to get the NSA retroactive immunity -- and they don't even have a lobbying budget!
What a country!
A simple google search shows that Kinne has been peddling this story in the blogosphere for quite some time now. Also another story about how bad the VA is.
She is affiliated with Cindy Sheehan. I don't think she should be taken seriously.
I don't think
"Jay Rockefeller is furious about this. He thought for sure he'd made this sort of thing legal already, and now he's going to have to work his ass of to get the NSA retroactive immunity -- and they don't even have a lobbying budget!"
At least he can count on Obama's vote.
Spend tens of billions of dollars to build this infrastructure. Use it to listen in on pillow talk. Isn't it cheaper to pay these guys to make 1-900 phone calls? Now I know what Cheney is doing from his secret location.
The point which no one has yet brought up is that listening in on "pillow talk" means that the listeners are NOT listening to potential terrorist calls. As is true of so much of what has been done under Bush's Maladministration, this has been a colossal waste of time. I can see listening in on calls from overseas which are scrambled, but when someone isn't even bothering to scramble, the chances are excellent that they are calling for personal reasons. Sheesh.
I have to wonder if this is more along the lines of people abusing their power for a few laughs and not part of some grand conspiracy to create a dictatorship.
One of the things I've noticed is that sometimes, the methods of the Bush administration uses to fight the war on terror seem like total incompetence. Doing something for the sake of doing something, even if it makes a knuckledragging neanderthal look like Einstein.
Kevin
You should check out Orin Kerr's and Marty Lederman's posts on this (www.volokh.com and www.balkinization.com).
Prof. Kerr seems to me one of the few intellectually honest (and knowledgeable) right-of-center law commentators on this and argues that ABC has it all wrong. Prof. Lederman disagrees, but I'd say they know their stuff.
"Hello. Is this Mrs Eileen Drolinson?"
"Yes..."
"I'm calling from XXX Hot Phone Flesh, & I have a very special offer just for you. As your son is a loyal customer, we awarded him two free hours of sexy phone fantasies. He rejected these. We are wondering if he has any friends that might be interested..."
"There's a pastor,... & his high-school sweetheart".
"Ok, how about we give you the minutes. We have Licking Lezzies, Hunky Chunkers, Water-sports..."
"Ooh, water-sports. I love to go in the water, but can't, 'cause of my hip".
"Alright. Here we go. 'Oh, I am hot; I am hot, for you, now. I just had three glasses of iced-tea & am carrying a full bladder..."