[389] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] NSA Voyeurs Admit Getting Their Phone Monitoring
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Thu Oct 9 12:41:23 2008
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Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2008 09:23:42 -0700
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NSA Voyeurs Admit Getting Their Phone Monitoring Jollies
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000440.html
Greetings. ABC News is reporting the accounts of NSA operatives who
are admitting to the inappropriate sharing and use of personal phone
calls officially being monitored for security purposes
( http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=5987804 ):
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.
The fact that this is being independently reported by two different
operatives suggests -- no big surprise -- that it may have been a
widespread practice, perhaps still in progress (well, until this
story hit the fan, anyway).
Similar instances in other contexts abound. Abuses of
government-controlled closed-circuit CCTV cameras for similar
"tantalizing" purposes are well known. Years ago, it was a not
uncommon practice for telephone company workers on late night shifts
to attach loudspeakers to particularly "interesting" phone lines in
central offices, and play the illegally monitored conversations
loudly for their own enjoyment while working.
In the current NSA case, the reported ability for conversations to
be monitored and particularly *shared* without cause in the
particular manners described suggests a breakdown (or a lack) of
appropriate access controls and "need to know" classifications on
such sensitive materials. It is unacceptable for operatives to be
able to access and "trade" such conversations for their own
enjoyment and without any legitimate security purpose being served.
In fact, such lax circumstances themselves could introduce their own
serious security risks relating to potentially serious misuse of
monitored conversations (of government officials and others) outside
of the official parameters of monitoring programs.
This once again drives home how critically important continuous and
rigorous *independent* oversight is for any such projects and
systems, no matter how crucial to security the ostensible purposes
of such operations are purported to be.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad
- Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
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