Monday, June 10, 2013

Flashback: NSA personnel listened to phone sex calls between Americans

From back in 2008, ABC News reported
[I]ntercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007. . . .

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.[Emph. added]
If ABC's report is true, the type of massive surveillance that the NSA does seems to be incompatible with a free and democratic country.  One well-placed employee at the NSA with a political agenda could find and leak very private information.   The leak of the "47%" tape did damage to Romney.  An incumbent with the willingness to use what the NSA knows would be invincible.

Hat tip: LegalInsurrection.

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