nsa agents admit spying on americans

from raw replay: ABC’s Brian Ross talked to NSA agents who admit spying on phone calls of Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism investigations. Brian Ross reported: “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.” This video is from ABC’s Good Morning America, broadcast October 9, 2008.

update: panel to study military eavesdropping
from nytimes: The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, said Thursday that the committee would investigate claims by two military eavesdroppers that they routinely listened in on private calls home from American military officers, aid workers and journalists stationed in Iraq.

Mr. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, called the accusations “extremely disturbing.”

“Any time there is an allegation regarding abuse of the privacy and civil liberties of Americans it is a very serious matter,” he said.

The two former intelligence officers, Adrienne Kinne, an Army reservist, and David Murfee Faulk, a Navy linguist, spoke Thursday to ABC News. They also were interviewed for a book on the National Security Agency by James Bamford, a former ABC producer and author of two earlier books on the agency, that is scheduled for publication next week.

Ms. Kinne and Mr. Faulk, both Arabic linguists, were based at Fort Gordon, Ga., where the N.S.A. has a large listening post focused on the Middle East. Ms. Kinne was there from 2001 to 2003 and Mr. Faulk was there from 2003 to 2007, Mr. Bamford said.

Ms. Kinne, who became an anti-Iraq-war activist, has spoken about her experiences as an eavesdropper to several Web publications since last year, but her accusations have not drawn broad attention. Mr. Faulk does not appear to have spoken out before.

Mr. Faulk told ABC that he and his colleagues listened to “personal phone calls of American officers, mostly in the Green Zone, calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends.”

He said the eavesdroppers would swap recordings of intimate calls for entertainment. “At times I was told: ‘Hey, check this out. There’s some good phone sex,’” he said.