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.

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.

Holy fuck! This will have huge repercussions. Unfortunately, the people who blew the whistle on this are going to be hit the hardest, but it wasn't just people acting on their own accord. They were ordered to spy on people who posed no threat.

"They were identified in our systems as 'belongs to the International Red Cross' and all these other organizations. And yet, instead of blocking these phone numbers we continued to collect on them," she told ABC News.

AFAIK, this isn't illegal, or at least it wasn't until the passage of the PAA, but it certainly puts to rest a number of questions. Americans who have nothing to do with terrorism or international espionage are targeted by the NSA for surveillance!

Why?!

ABC News: Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans