ABC: NSA agents admit spying on Americans' private calls

The Bush administration has repeatedly defended its warrantless surveillance of Americans as being directed only against "people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations." Now two intercept operators who worked for the National Security Agency at Fort Gordon in Georgia have come forward to tell ABC News that isn't true. David Murfee Faulk described to ABC's Brian Ross how he had listened to "personal phone calls of American officers, mostly in the Green Zone [in Baghdad], calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses and sometimes their girlfriends." "Co-workers of mine were ordered to transcribe these calls," Faulk stated. "When one of my co-workers went to a supervisor and said, 'But sir, these are personal calls,' the supervisor said, 'My orders were to transcribe everything.'"
Adrienne Kinne, who like Faulk is an Arab linguist, said she had received the same orders and had listened to hundreds of Americans in the Middle East simply calling home. She emphasized that these were "Americans who are not in any way, shape, or form associated with anything to do with terrorism. It was just personal conversations that really nobody else should have been listening to."

Finally some people who finally come out and expose some hard proof about what the government is really up to. I wonder what will happen to these people for coming out and saying this...

When asked about President Bush's statement that the intercepts were directed only at known al-Qaeda suspects, Kinne stated, "That is completely a lie." She said that military officers, journalists, and Red Cross workers were among the people whose calls she transcribed.

Faulk told ABC that certain calls were even passed around among the intercept operators like office jokes. "I was told, 'Hey, check this out, there's some good phone sex.' ... It was there, stored the way you'd look at songs on your iPod."

Source

The whole thing is wrong but listening into people having phone sex?! what the?

[edit on 9-10-2008 by baseball101]

what kind of information does the government think they will get out of its own soldiers? maybe they fear they are going to tell thier loved ones that the helicopter crash wasnt really caused by the "bad guys", or even that they have some traitors among them. Either way it is rediculous to listen in on calls when the men and women fighting for our supposed freedom believe it to be private.