Two whistleblowers have come forward to ABC News with allegations that the NSA routinely listened in on the phone calls of ordinary Americans, journalists, aid workers, and military personnel who were living in the Middle East and calling friends and loved ones back in the US. Both of these whistleblowers were employed by the NSA as intercept operators at a facility in Fort Gordon, Georgia, where they were tasked with intercepting, recording, and monitoring satellite phone calls into and out of Baghdad's Green Zone.

According to the ABC report, these operators allege that it was common practice at the NSA facility to not only record the phone conversations of ordinary Americans with no connection whatsoever to terrorism, but to single out the exchanges that were somehow novel or salacious for sharing, ridicule, and general discussion.

One of the whistleblowers described to ABC how he would be told by his follow operators, "Hey, check this out, 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'."

While the whisteblowers' stories of phone sex recordings being passed around the facility are extremely disturbing, they aren't even the most troubling aspect of the report.

A waste of time?

The two whistleblowers confirmed that the intercept program has saved the lives of American troops by yielding IED locations and other bits of intel, but they take this to be evidence that the agency's monitoring of ordinary phone conversations is a waste of time.

In spite of the fact that the agents believed intercepting such calls to be pointless, they were nonetheless ordered to record them and transcribe them anyway. The fact that the NSA remains interested in these calls even after they're identified as non-terrorism-related is truly remarkable, and it leads me to believe that the information collected is being archived for data mining purposes.

I suggest data mining as an explanation for retaining them, because I can't think of any legitimate reason for the NSA to order the archiving of a phone sex call made by an American military officer. But even so, the data mining explanation makes little sense on its face, since why would you feed into a data mining program information that two experienced and trained human agents had already screened and found innocuous. That's precisely backwards, but at least that explanation doesn't involve blackmail, suppression of political dissent, or any of the other nasty stuff that the US government has been known to do with recordings of its citizens' phone conversations.