We all remember BushCo and his minions scoffing away as folks concerned about (the inevitable) abuses of collecting telephone data on Americans in an overly broad fashion. We were told that this would be only target evil-doers and those who talk to them.
Well,eavesdropping on Americans overseas is not only routine, but it is a sport:
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.
Read the whole thing. The whistleblowers have pretty much told us what we knew already — that an Executive Branch with no checks is a rogue branch, doing what it wants no matter the law or basic decency. The NSA spokespeople obfuscate behind lots of vaguely patriotic puffery, and no one asks them about the offense to patriotism embodies in spying on Americans with no cause. Jay Rockefeller says he’ll get to the bottom of this, but since the Senator has been a major enabler of legislation to enable this bullshit I don’t have very high hopes.