WASHINGTON, DC — The Bush administration, now on the last of its last legs, has taken many a bold step into the realm of personal privacy since the infamous strike against New York City and Washington DC on 9/11, always assuring citizens that the honest and patriotic have nothing to worry about. “Nothing,” that is, unless they have a problem with their most intimate secrets being overheard and ridiculed.According to a recent report by ABC News, the National Security Administration’s (NSA) wide-ranging wiretapping program has not merely routinely listened into, but transcribed, the private – and sometimes very private – phone calls of American citizens.
This stands in stark contract to insistences by President George W. Bush that only calls from a “known al Qaeda suspect” would trigger surveillance.
Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist who was assigned to a special NSA military program at agency’s Fort Gordon Back Hall at Fort Gordon November 2001 to 2003 calls Bush’s promises “completely a lie.”
Kinne should know; she’s listened into plenty of calls from American journalists, U.S. military officers, and American aid workers that she described to ABC as containing “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”
While it might be argued that a call is a call, Kinne assured ABC that the identities of the callers were not a mystery. “They were identified in our systems as ‘belongs to the International Red Cross’ and all these other organizations. And yes, instead of blocking these phone numbers, we continued to collect on them,” she explained.
Apparently unable to locate enough phone calls from actual terrorists, Kinne claims that the NSA staff focused on often highly personal calls between those stationed in the Middle East and their offices or homes within the United States.
Instead of discussions of sensitive matters of importance to national security, fellow intercept operator and former Navy Arab linguist David Murfee Faulk described the calls as being from men who were “talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another.”
Faulk admitted to ABC that operators, having listening to the calls, would often share the juiciest bits with other staffers, sometimes via digital computer files. During a particularly saucy call, Faulk says it wasn’t uncommon to hear someone say “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out.”
Both Kinne and Faulk insist that when linguists complained about listening into and transcribing personal conversations they were told to continue to do so.
Thanks to the allegations of the two whistleblowers, Congress has launched an investigation into whether the NSA has been improperly eavesdropping on citizens since it introduced its court order-free wiretapping program in 2005. A major condition for keeping the surveillance on the legal side has been that one participant in the call must be a terror suspect.
Unsurprisingly, the NSA, through spokeswoman Judith Emmell, assures the public that an internal investigation has found allegations to be “unsubstantiated,” although some are still being looked into.
