US Spying on Its Own Citizens Abroad

In a world exclusive, ABC News has exposed a US government eavesdropping program that has been intercepting private communications between US citizens abroad and their friends and families at home.

Quoting two former military intercept operators, the spying program allegedly eavesdropped on calls about "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

ABC News quotes one of the whistleblowers, former Navy Arab linguist David Murfee Faulk, as saying "he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007."

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.

Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.

"I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me," he said.

Congress has already stepped in, with the Chairman of the Senate's Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, calling the allegations "extremely disturbing" and promising that his "committee will take whatever action is necessary."