ABC News Exposes Secret Government Phone Sex Ring

Greyhawk

Bush to blame... details at 11....

ABC News: Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans. (Americans in Iraq, by the way - not your grandmother in Boise.)

The story is told by two "whistleblowers" - former enlisted troops who were stationed at the National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia. You're not likely to hear any detailed response from the 'accused', whatever service they perform is the sort generally explained by the official answer "no comment."

But here's what Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk say was going on behind those closed doors:

ABC: "...hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators..."

Kinne "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,"... 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.

If that's so, I'd counter that phone calls were intercepted, and until they were heard there was no way to know who was holding that phone or what they were going to say. But some might argue it's wrong on principle to throw a wide blanket over a war zone and intercept as much communication as possible.

Arguably, the question becomes "what do you do with the innocuous calls once you've determined they aren't useful?" Here's Faulk's answer:

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.

Even if "some colonel" was using a military phone with the full knowledge that he could be monitored, that sort of stuff sucks, says I.

Oddly enough, ABC doesn't report it, but there are also claims that at least one operator was reprimanded for ignoring a fax that "that purported to provide information on the location of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" and "contained types of information that required that it be translated and transmitted to President Bush within 15 minutes" and instead was "eavesdropping on two nongovernmental aid workers driving in Iraq ". According to Adrienne Kinne that operator was Adrienne Kinne - more on that (including the source) shortly.

First, let's acknowledge that Faulk expresses his remorse for his actions regarding "phone sex":

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.

Some might accuse Faulk and his pals of being creepy little assholes abusing the system with which they're entrusted - but ABC wants you to know who the real villain in this story is. Here's their lead paragraphs on the story:

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."

Thanks only, of course, to the hard work and tireless efforts of the investigative journalists at ABC, right? Wrong - on that topic either ABC is lying, or their subjects are lying to them. And David Swanson is righteously pissed:

On Thursday, ABC News reported a big new break in the story of illegal and unconstitutional spying that our government has engaged in for years now, except that there was nothing new in the story and the important parts were left out.

The ABC News announcer began the video report thus:

"This is the first time any of the actual intercept operators, the people who listen in and record phone calls on behalf of U.S. intelligence agencies, the first time any of them has come forward."

But this would have been revealed as blatant nonsense by simply googling the names of the two operators, Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk. I reported Kinne's story on July 1, 2007, on a website that is read by hundreds of thousands of people every month, including quite a few Congressional staffers. The very popular radio show, Democracy Now!, reported on one aspect of Kinne's story on May 13, 2008.

I first reported Faulk's story on May 19, 2008. He contacted me because he had read the story I'd written about Kinne. That point is of interest because the report posted online by ABC News on October 9, 2008, reads:

"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."

This is absolute nonsense, since Faulk learned of Kinne's story by reading it on my website in May.

You can follow the links at that link for details. What you'll discover are fairly unexciting claims that the NSA intercepts phone calls from Iraq, there were no mass quantities of WMDs found in Iraq, Kinne's explanation that she was finally speaking out in 2007 because of her opposition to the surge, and her claim that she was reprimanded in 2003 for ignoring a WMD document while eavesdropping on aid workers. As the angry author acknowledges, only the phone sex angle got this story on ABC.

Wait - you'll also learn that Kinne is a member of IVAW (IVAW on Mudville, IVAW on MilBlogs), another fact that ABC didn't include in their story. And you'll learn that every round fired by every tank in Baghdad in April 2003 was somehow controlled by the NSA. (Or maybe just one, and it was used to kill journalists...)

This detail has Swanson pissed, too:

When I reported on Kinne over a year ago, I reported that Senator Patrick Leahy was ignoring her requests. Now, in response to ABC News picking up the story, Leahy is pretending to be interested in the matter.

Or maybe he's just looking at an election year calendar this year.

As for ABC's motivation, it might be the many, many fabulous prizes they could win for "investigative journalism"

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.

...or they might just be trying to sell books:

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.

That book will be published by Doubleday - a company that I can reveal here for the first time ever has a super top secret exclusive deal to distribute Mickey Mouse books for Disney - the company that OWNS ABC!!!!!!