They Would Never Invade Our Privacy

Since the revelation of the illegal surveillance program in December 2005, the fundamental question - who has the government been spying on? - has yet to be answered, and with the FISA legislation providing immunity for the telecoms we thought it would forever fade into the background. But it's more likely that the truth will come out in drips and drabs; maybe not the whole truth, but enough of it to shock the conscience. Today we have another fallen domino:

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 [...]

"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.

But, we were told that it was a Terrorist Surveillance Program, and Obama Osama bin Laden (darn it, I just always mix them up) would come to our ballgames and sell tainted Dodger Dogs to us if we didn't allow wise and benevolent Government access to every piece of communication in the world!

Funny how that worked out.

Turns out that the ordinary grunts listening to this stuff were passing around audio snippets to each other:

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.

And then there's this amazing statement, which kind of sums up life in the 21st-century surveillance state:

Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."

"They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game," said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country's warrantless surveillance program.

"This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law," Turley said....

"Information assurance." How pleasantly banal.

See the beginning here for who was spied on - not just military and government personnel but journalists and aid workers. That's exactly who I would target if I wanted to control the flow of information to the public. And there was no mistake here - members of the International Red Cross were surveilled and were "identified in our systems as 'belongs to the International Red Cross'," according to one of the intercept operators.

This is what everybody voted for in the Congress. Not to "protect America from harm," but to maintain and indemnify a shadow spying system so the highest levels of government can maintain control and power. It's against the law and many of our foundational principles and George Bush did it anyway, and the Congress - Democrats and Republicans - enabled him.

And they're still doing it.

It goes without saying that such attention to the calls and communications of ordinary Americans actually hurts our capacity to deal with any terrorist threat as simply a function of time management and prioritizing. Bush's Department of Homeland Security funded this report.

The government should not be building predictive data-mining programs systems that attempt to figure out who among millions is a terrorist, a privacy and terrorism commission funded by Homeland Security reported Tuesday. The commission found that the technology would not work and the inevitable mistakes would be un-American.

The committee, created by the National Research Council in 2005, also expressed doubts about the effectiveness of technology designed to decide from afar whether a person had terrorist intents, saying false positives could quickly lead to privacy invasions.

"Automated identification of terrorists through data mining (or any other known methodology) is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts," the report found. "Even in well-managed programs, such tools are likely to return significant rates of false positives, especially if the tools are highly automated."

This is true, but of course you would have to believe that the system Bush and his pals set up was in any way designed for terrorist surveillance. Based on the details we now know, I can't imagine it was. The program is an example of how authoritarian societies maintain order and power.

You'll be thrilled to know that Jay Rockefeller is going to begin an examination of this and request information from the Administration about it. I don't know what's more hysterical - that he thinks he can get one scrap of paper from the White House, or that he thinks we'll buy that he's about to sit down and investigate himself, in effect.

Greenwald has more.