ABC News has an article on the eavesdropping of Americans that answers any remaining questions regarding the FISA Amendments passed this past summer. Essentially, the article details the use of surveillance systems to spy on ordinary Americans. Here’s a quote from the article:

“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,” said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”

The article goes on to describe the nature of some of the phone call as pillow talk or phone sex. Some of the individuals involved were from the US Military, the International Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders. Naturally, the Senate is investigating. The article further states that some especially juicy clips were saved by employees of the NSA.

Unfortunately, abuse of surveillance systems by insiders is nothing new. Bruce Schneier has shown us that surveillance cameras are abused and ineffective. Six well-known security and privacy researchers have warned about this sort of abuse with telephone surveillance as well (pdf).

The only thing that is remotely surprising about this is that we have specific details from whistleblowers, who are risking their careers and livelihood to tell us about this abuse. In this case, it is even more surprising that not one, but two independent whistleblowers came forward simply because the agency involved was the notoriously secretive NSA.

The GCHQ, which is the British equivalent of the NSA, recently dealt with its own whistleblower: Katherine Gun. In this case, Gun was a translator asked to favorably translate documents as evidence to garner support for the Iraq war. Her case was dropped at trial almost immediately. Speculatively, the decision to drop the case was due to the calculated decision that producing the evidence required to prosecute her would have been more embarrassing for the GCHQ than simply letting her go.

Many whistleblowers find the ethics of betraying their employer for the greater good an excruciating ethical dilemma. Check out this BBC News interview of Katherine Gun if you are interested in how she weighed the decision. (There’s a book about her if you are more ambitious.) For these reasons and many more, whistleblowers like Mark Klein in the AT&T case that prompted the FISA Amendments and now David Murfee Faulk and Adrienne Kinne in this more recent case with the NSA shouldn’t be our last line of defense.

Essentially, lesson from this ABC News article is simple: surveillance tools will be abused. It is human nature for power to corrupt. The Founding Fathers of the United States recognized this and tried to limit the power of the government explictly for this reason. They built checks and balances into our government because they knew that hoping for whistleblowers to highlight problems was not reliable. Why does the current US government not seem to comprehend this?  How many more whistleblowers and ABC News stories will it take for our government to catch on?