Liberal Talk Radio

Will this get people paying attention to wiretap abuses at the NSA?

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.

They’d listen in on phone calls from aid workers and members of the military — U.S. citizens, mind you — calling home from overseas. Then they’d carelessly pass around the audio to their co-workers and laugh about it.

Think about this… it took what, 6 months since the wiretapping legislation (FISA) passed congress for this kind of abuse to start? Where will we be in 6 years?

And look, before you dismiss it by saying, “well, they’re just listening to my phone calls, who cares?” Don’t think it stops there. I try not to be hyperbolic about these things, but when you put the pieces together, the legal precedents the Bush administration has assembled over the years (Padilla, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld), the collected impact is truly scary.