Monday, June 17, 2013

Culture

One never quite knows the truth of stories like this, because SECRET, but if true this hardly portrays an institutional culture which respects privacy and has meaningful safeguards (from 2008).
US Soldier's 'Phone Sex' Intercepted, Shared

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.

This isn't just individual abuse of power, it's an environment where people thought it was cool to share.