Remember That Time the NSA Listened to U.S. Troops Have Phone Sex With Loved Ones Back Home?

Spend
enough time online, and you’ll find someone who believes that
because the National Security Agency exists solely to keep
Americans safe, it would never do anything it absolutely didn’t
need to do in order to fulfill its mission. “Even if it did,” argue
defenders of government spying, “I have nothing to hide.” 

If you believe that’s really the case, recall that shortly
before Sen. Obama was elected president, ABC News
reported that military interceptors working for the NSA
listened to troops’ private conversations with loved ones back
home, and would gather as a group to listen to especially salacious
calls: 

[F]ormer 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.

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.

Read the whole thing
here,
via The Atlantic Wire. And remember, so long as there’s a
potential for abuse, abuse will happen.