“Hey, check this out. There's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out.”
So recalled David Murfee Faulk, a former NSA employee explaining his job at the agency listening in on phone calls from around the world.
It was like skipping through songs on an iPod, Faulk recalled. If they were “entertaining” enough, some workers would share the content of the calls – often between US military stationed overseas or even people working for organisations like the International Red Cross or Medicins Sans Frontieres – around the office.
According to another whistleblower, ex-US military linguist Adrienne Kinne, her jobs involved listening in to “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”
“We knew they were working for these aid organizations. They were identified in our systems as 'belongs to the International Red Cross' and all these other organizations,” Kinne told ABC News in 2009. “And yet, instead of blocking these phone numbers, we continued to collect on them.”
Enter, a few years later, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA and (by now) former employee of a company called Booz Allen Hamilton, a “defence contractor” that specialises in government and corporate security and which is a significant player in the U.S. intelligence industry.
Snowden revealed to The Guardian last week that the US government was accessing phone records of its citizens and, using a program called PRISM, technology companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and Google allowed the US government access to electronic data.
Those companies denied any at-will relationship with the NSA but the connection added another twist to this 21st century international spy thriller that has also seen Snowden flee his home and life in Hawaii for the apparent sanctuary of Hong Kong.
You couldn't make this up.
The revelations have wider repercussions beyond the United States with the specific qualifier of the American actions being that it is the privacy of non-US citizens that is being targeted.
Unsurprisingly, this has opened up privacy concerns in Britain and Europe with William Hague, Britain's Foreign Secretary, telling his a TV interviewer that “law-abiding people have nothing to fear”.
But, no matter, your phone calls, emails, and Facebook messages will all be read by someone, somewhere, anyway, just to double-check.
Australia's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bob Carr, offered a similar defence to Hague, claiming he “wouldn't think” Australians need be concerned by the recent revelations. But of course, he would say that. Yet much of the mainstream Australian media appears to agree, with the story being treated pretty much only of international interest.
But in Australia, this kind of surveillance has been in operation for several years. As Senator Nick Xenophon told Fairfax Media (in one of the few reported follow up stories on the issue): “Every phone record and every email to your computer can be dug up without a warrant.”
The (almost) funny part of this story? Sent from the US to Australia via email, someone at either a US or Australian government spy agency probably read it before an editor at SBS did.
They could have at least run it through a spell checker.
