Elaborating on a post from earlier, these are the guardians of our liberty:
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.
I think this is why our Surveiller-in-Chief's assurances that we needn't worry about a runaway government agency because we have robust oversight, etc., seem to ring so hollow. Because most people understand on an intuitive level that when government grants itself this kind of unchecked power to operate in secret, it will eventually be abused by someone, somewhere, sometime. It's not a matter of bad intent, it's just basic human nature. Listening in on X-rated conversations is actually one of the more benign intrusions. Other abuses of the regime, however, can---and likely will, in the future---be somewhat more ominous in design.
(Via.)
---Baron V
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