Not Tonight, Honey, The NSA Is Listening

Ok, so this isn't directly related to the campaign...but ABC reports that the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program may have been more widespread than has been previously indicated. According to whistleblower Adrienne Kinne, when she was working as an intercept officer, "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." Kinne said the eavesdropping included hundreds of personal calls that had nothing to do with terrorism.

Another intercept officer, David Murfee Faulk, spoke to ABC as well. He corroborated Kinne's story, saying the officers passed around the audio files like so many Perez Hilton links.

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.

The whistleblowers told ABC that the wiretapping program does gather useful information that has prevented potential attacks. But Kinne also said monitoring calls home from the likes of the International Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders workers makes "the haystack bigger" so that actionable information becomes harder to pinpoint.

Both Kinne and Faulk first spoke about the matter with journalist James Bamford for The Shadow Factory, his upcoming book on the NSA.

-- Evie Stone

1:35 PM ET | 10-10-2008 | permalink

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