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.

…

“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.

…

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.

…

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.

Spotted at Jezebel:

The National Enquirer is reporting that Jamie Lynn Spears is with child again because she thought she couldn’t get pregnant while breast feeding. This is from the National Enquirer, so proverbial grain of salt, but they were right about that Edwards thing…

And we still have people in this country who think there’s too much sex education?

He looks like he thinks this is the best tackle he’s ever made:

Remember the huge pinup series by Art Frahm, the one that featured girls whose panties had fallen down around their ankles at the most embarrassing moment possible? I blogged about it here (more than five years ago, urk) and linked to James Lilek’s definitive essay on the subject. I see a certain stylistic sympathy to Frahm’s lost lingerie oeuvre in this photograph of a woman whose skirt has just headed south:

There’s a larger version of this picture where I found it, at Silent Porn Star.

I don’t care if it is made from chrome-plated spring steel, you can’t rightly call this thing a chastity belt:

Lest you remain in any doubt about how this thing works, the uniquely Japanese anatomical cut-away drawing in the next panel will clear things right up for you:

Similar Sex Blogging:

• The Romance Of The Chastity Belt
• Procreative Chastity, Anal Freedom
• Chastity, Not So Historical

I freely admit to being wholly ignorant about the anatomical details of human lactation, knowing only that, under appropriate circumstances, there can be milk, and that glands and ducts are involved. As a guy who has never been a father, I figure the details are not my department.

That said, when I stumbled over this fetish lactation picture among the cover art on a Japanese DVD, I was somewhat startled to note that in this picture (and in every other picture on the box) milk was being expressed in numerous divergent streams:

What’s up with that? I guess I always assumed, you know, basic bilateral symmetry, two boobs, two nipples, two ducts, two quirts of milk, two cups of coffee. That hard-working right nipple up there is pumping out, what, four squirts and a dribble?

I could Google it, but it’s easier and more fun just to say something ignorant on the internets and wait for all the helpful people to come along and set me straight…

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Don't Cry Over Spilled Milk
• Are You Thirsty?

Remember about two weeks ago, when I mentioned the new public bondage site, coming from our kinky friends at Kink.com?

Well, Public Disgrace is now live, and looks to be living up to (some of) its promises.

About half the pictures in the sample galleries are close-in shots of hardcore bondage sex in what look to be protected, semi-outdoor spaces. To be honest, those aren’t terribly interesting to me, because I have a harder time with suspension of disbelief, and so there isn’t a lot of newness there. To me it’s “just porn”, with (by 21st century standards) no particularly transgressive edge.

On the other hand, I find the soft-core “pure” public bondage shots to be more interesting, because they seem to occur in genuinely public settings, complete with interested onlookers:

I will confess I find the branding for this new site a little confusing. If the goal is, to use their words, “unique street scenes of erotic humiliation”, what’s disgraceful about that? If the fantasy of a woman in chains is that she has to do what you make her do, I get that she may be embarrassed or humiliated by the public exposure, but I don’t see any disgrace in it; to me, disgrace connotes an aspect of guilt or sin or wrongdoing or bad behavior, and one of the essential transactions at the core of BDSM is that the submissive is liberated of responsibility for the things he or she is “made” to do. Hence, no disgrace. Unless the disgrace is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder, the putative onlooker shouting “that’s disgraceful!” or getting violent, like this guy?