[Infowarrior] - Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans

[Richard Forno]

ABC News
Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans
U.S. Officers' "Phone Sex" Intercepted; Senate Demanding Answers
By BRIAN ROSS, VIC WALTER, and ANNA SCHECTER

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5987804

Oct. 9, 2008—

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.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D- 
WV), called the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the  
committee has begun its own examination.

"We have requested all relevant information from the Bush  
Administration," Rockefeller said Thursday. "The Committee will take  
whatever action is necessary."

"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.

Watch "World News Tonight with Charles Gibson" and "Nightline" for  
more of Brian Ross' exclusive report.

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.

"There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of  
our citizens are treated with respect," said President Bush at a news  
conference this past February.

But the accounts of the two whistleblowers, which could not be  
independently corroborated, raise serious questions about how much  
respect is accorded those Americans whose conversations are  
intercepted in the name of fighting terrorism.

US Soldier's 'Phone Sex' Intercepted, Shared

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.

Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in  
Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.

"I feel that it was something that the people should not have done.  
Including me," he said.

In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden,  
now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are  
not intercepted.

"It's not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on  
protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are  
affiliated with it," Gen. Hayden testified.

He was asked by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), "Are you just doing this  
because you just want to pry into people's lives?"

"No, sir," General Hayden replied.

Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate  
and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US  
intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should  
expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part  
of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."

"They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their  
telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of  
fraternity game," said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor  
at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on  
the country's warrantless surveillance program.

"This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law,"  
Turley said.

Listening to Aid Workers

NSA awarded Adrienne Kinne a NSA Joint Service Achievement Medal in  
2003 at the same time she says she was listening to hundreds of  
private conversations between Americans, including many from the  
International Red Cross and Doctors without Borders.

"We knew they were working for these aid organizations," Kinne told  
ABC News. "They were identified in our systems as 'belongs to the  
International Red Cross' and all these other organizations. And yet,  
instead of blocking these phone numbers we continued to collect on  
them," she told ABC News.

A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, Michael Goldfarb, said: "The  
abuse of humanitarian action through intelligence gathering for  
military or political objectives, threatens the ability to assist  
populations and undermines the safety of humanitarian aid workers."

Both Kinne and Faulk said their military commanders rebuffed questions  
about listening in to the private conversations of Americans talking  
to Americans.

"It was just always, that , you know, your job is not to question.  
Your job is to collect and pass on the information," Kinne said.

Some times, Kinne and Faulk said, the intercepts helped identify  
possible terror planning in Iraq and saved American lives.

"IED's were disarmed before they exploded, that people who were  
intending to harm US forces were captured ahead of time," Faulk said.

NSA job evaluation forms show he regularly received high marks for job  
performance. Faulk left his job as a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh  
to join the Navy after 9/11.

Kinne says the success stories underscored for her the waste of time  
spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the  
terrorist needle in the haystack.

"By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and  
aid organizations, it's almost like they're making the haystack bigger  
and it's harder to find that piece of information that might actually  
be useful to somebody," she said. "You're actually hurting our ability  
to effectively protect our national security."

The NSA: "The Shadow Factory"

Both former intercept operators came forward at first to speak with  
investigative journalist Jim Bamford for a book on the NSA, "The  
Shadow Factory," to be published next week.

"It's extremely rare," said Bamford, who has written two previous  
books on the NSA, including the landmark "Puzzle Palace" which first  
revealed the existence of the super secret spy agency.

"Both of them felt that what they were doing was illegal and improper,  
and immoral, and it shouldn't be done, and that's what forces  
whistleblowers."

A spokesman for General Hayden, Mark Mansfield, said: "At NSA, the law  
was followed assiduously. The notion that General Hayden sanctioned or  
tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face."

The director of the NSA, Lt. General Keith B. Alexander, declined to  
directly answer any of the allegations made by the whistleblowers.

In a written statement, Gen. Alexander said: "We have been entrusted  
to protect and defend the nation with integrity, accountability, and  
respect for the law. As Americans, we take this obligation seriously.  
Our employees work tirelessly for the good of the nation, and serve  
this country proudly."

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