NSA Wiretapped Ordinary Americans

The concern that an expanded wiretap program would infringe on the privacy of ordinary Americans now seems justified:

"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."


She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States.

You can read more about it here.



[edit on 9-10-2008 by ClintK]

Years ago, back in the mid 90's, I used to work with the development of storage servers for a major Fortune 500 computer corporation. These servers are basically large arrays of disk drives with a networking interface providing high speed real time storage of data.
Our largest customer was the NSA who used these servers to record communication traffic to the servers to be processed later we were told.
This apparently has been going on for quite some time.