ABC News: Whistleblowers say government routinely eavesdrops on communications of ordinary Americans overseas, including the troops, aid workers, journalists:

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. ...

"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. [..]

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. ...

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. ..."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."

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee, said in a statement: “The Committee will take whatever action is necessary to ensure those rules are followed and any violations are addressed.” More from the Post.

Update: Discussing this piece, I was struck by how some former military and intel officers describe this story as basically another sign of incompetence. e.g. some stupid grunt isn't told what the rules are, or his commander doesn't enforce it right, etc. "Yes, bored, stupid, enlisted personnel misusing their positions, even stupider officers who are afraid they are going to miss something, and then leaders at the top who are so ignorant of how their organizations really work that they have no idea it is even going on," one former intelligence official responded to the report. "It is a complete failure of management just as Abu Ghraib was. Do you think that any of those guys have any idea what Private Jones is really doing?" The sort of "bad apples" or "bored apples" interpretation, but not a policy failure, or indeed, the policy. But as an ordinary civilian who has sort of understood the whole FISA debate, however ritualistic or fictitious, as being about policy assurances that a nominal legal/oversight system was being set up to prevent just such systemic abuses if not occasional ones, I find such allegations as those in the ABC report and forthcoming Bamford book while not surprising, deeply infuriating. Are they just all lying to our faces all the time? Is there zero oversight? Are all the statements from the president on down through Congressional staffers just totally phony? And I think the Congressional oversight chairmen as the chief representative of the people's only check on a secret system risk becoming the target of real political wrath in the near future, especially as more is learned in coming weeks and months, as more certainly comes out from the Bamford book and other accounts, for looking at best chronically ineffectual, and at worst, deeply deeply complicit in their ritualistic roles of pretending to participate in the construction of a system of oversight that clearly seems to have none (except the press). Where are the hearings on what the government is spying on? Where is the debate about how much the public is willing to trade in terms of civil liberties and privacy for alleged increased security? Whose job is it to take the lead in this process? What affirmative measures have they taken to prevent abuses and ensure the system is working the way they said it would? How many actual terrorism suspects detected -- two, three? vs. how many thousands or tens of thousands of ordinary innocent Americans people -soldiers, etc.- surveilled?

Posted by Laura at October 9, 2008 01:05 PM