Wiretapping Your Phone Sex
Any time you are tempted to believe the bland assurances that government wiretapping (or any other broad surveillance) is strictly for purposes of national security, think about this story and remember that government employees are the same kind of monkeys the rest of us are — snoopy, gossipy, voyeuristic, and inclined to disregard “the rules” whenever it seems likely that we’ll get away with it. Which means, they will listen to your phone sex if you let them listen to anything that they don’t have to justify (individually, specifically, each and every time) to a skeptical judge:
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
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“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.
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Another intercept 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.
“Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another,” said Faulk.
The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other’s allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program.
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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.
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In White’s perfect ant world, everything that is not forbidden is compulsory. In our world, humans are imperfect. That is the secret of human robustness. Laws that attempt to make the world perfect create a rigidity that eventually precludes thought. The great romance of this world is its imperfection. Unless you live in a mental world that is free of Bad Guys that use the telephone, or have an extremely large number of intelligent judges rapidly available 24/7, it may be more constructive to not have to justify monitoring “specifically, each and every time.”
Whatever happened to probable cause for authorization of a wire tap. We have enough Big Brother going on without the government listening in on phone sex between people. Just because there is the technology to do something, doesn’t mean it should be done as a matter of course. Besides, all this listening in on any and every phone call distracted from finding the real terrorists.
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Joe, there are these things called FISA courts. . . I’m pretty sure they’ve worked out that someone needs to be on call 24/7 by now.
And these kinds of things would hopefully be less likely in a system with proper oversight, in an administration that encouraged accountability rather than treating all friends as infallible.
What I reckon happens with just about every new technology is that we push it to the limits of what it can do, with just about anything we’ve dreamed up. Sometimes we don’t think of good guidelines for it’s use, sometimes we do. In this case, I think if there Are guidelines (bet there are), nobody cares too much about making sure they’re followed, for whatever reason. That needs to change.