The government is listening to our phone sex

Soldiers in Iraq--men and women who have honorably taken oaths to defend the Constitution--and their loved ones may have had their own rights violated when Bush's terrorist surveillance program, which allows the intelligence community to monitor phone calls between the United States and overseas without a court order (if someone on the call is actually a terror suspect), was abused. ABC reports on the investigation into allegations that U.S. intelligence officers shockingly intercepted, recorded, and shared hundreds of phone sex calls between U.S. citizens:

"Adrienne Kinne, a former U.S. Army Reserves Arab linguist, told ABC News the NSA [National Security Agency] was listening to the phone calls of U.S. military officers, journalists and aid workers overseas who were talking about 'personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.'"

In fact, what amused the workers most was phone sex, which was common between partners separated by the war.

"[David Murfee] 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."

Cute, right?

The Patriot Act has always been controversial because its critics have maintained that giving the executive branch of the government seemingly limitless surveillance powers might open up a Pandora's Box of abuses. The allegations currently being brought forth against the National Security Agency seem to confirm that. Personally, I don't know about you guys but the whole move seemed to have an awfully menacing Big Brother tone at the time, and I sure as heck don't feel any better about it now.

How would you feel if you're making all these personal sacrifices and the country you were working hard to defend was listening in on your most intimate phone calls? I mean, WTF is going on?

Related: "Married to the War" series