Tags : National Security Agency, NSA, intercept operators, Americans abroad
Posted: Friday , Oct 10, 2008 at 1341 hrs IST New York, October 10: :
The US' National Security Agency's (NSA) intercept operators spent their time eavesdropping on saucy conversations between Americans abroad and their wives or girl friends rather than monitoring potential terrorists interaction, two former military intercept operators have claimed.
Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to the programme, described the contents of calls they listened to as "personal, private things" of Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated or have anything to do with terrorism.
Another intercept operator former Navy Arab linguist David Murfee Faulk, 39, talking to 'ABC News', said that he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.
He said they listened in to Americans calling home to talk to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another.
'ABC News' quoted Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), as describing the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the committee has begun its own examination.
"We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration," Rockefeller said ON Thursday. "The Committee will take whatever action is necessary."
"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," Kinne said. The network said the accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other's allegations, provide the first inside look at the day-to-day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance programme.
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