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.
