Well, all you security and anti-terrorism fans, that didn’t take long.  Brian Ross at ABC News reveals that those secret telephone intercepts that our government just had to do to protect us from terrorism turns out to be a hoot for our bored government employees.  So much for our President’s promise that “that will never happen.”

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.

The problem is that monitoring telephone calls is kind of boring.  Unless, the calls happen to be funny, especially “phone sex” type calls, which are really funny to everyone except the American soldier who thinks he’s having a private conversation with his wife.  While the soldier would likely be remarkably unhappy about it, it seems that the interceptor is having so much fun listening that he can’t help but share it with the rest of the guys:

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.

But this could never happen.  Never.  The government swore that it would only listen to calls to protect me from terrorism.  They never even mentioned listening in on fun calls too.

So what does our respected and trusted top NSA official have to say?

The director of the NSA, Lt. General Keith B. Alexander, declined to directly answer any of the allegations made by the whistleblowers.

In a written statement, Gen. Alexander said: “We have been entrusted to protect and defend the nation with integrity, accountability, and respect for the law. As Americans, we take this obligation seriously. Our employees work tirelessly for the good of the nation, and serve this country proudly.”

Well, now I feel better.  Don’t you?

H/T Turley and Dan Solove