The history of surveillance on American citizens is as old as dirt. It's still going on. The thugs who run the country are spying on American citizens, as I knew they would once the Bush administration deemed it necessary to wage the war on terror. I have always said that we know very little about what the government actually doing, and that when scandal emerges, you can multiply the bad news by five to gain a real sense of what's going on. The below story -- published on October 9 -- was part of that great unknown. What else don't we know?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Congress is looking into allegations that National Security Agency linguists have been eavesdropping on Americans abroad.

The congressional oversight committees said Thursday that the Americans targeted included military officers in Iraq who called friends and family in the United States.

The allegations were made by two former military intercept operators on a television news report Thursday evening.

A terrorist surveillance program instituted by the Bush administration allows the intelligence community to monitor phone calls between the United States and overseas without a court order -- as long as one party to the call is a terror suspect.

Adrienne Kinne, a former U.S. Army Reserves Arab linguist, told ABC News the NSA 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."

David Murfee Faulk, a former U.S. Navy Arab linguist, said in the news report that he and his colleagues were listening to the conversations of military officers in Iraq who were talking with their spouses or girlfriends in the United States.

According to Faulk, they would often share the contents of some of the more salacious calls stored on their computers, listening to what he called "phone sex" and "pillow talk."

Both Kinne and Faulk worked at the NSA listening facility at Fort Gordon, Georgia. They told ABC that when linguists complained to supervisors about eavesdropping on personal conversations, they were ordered to continue transcribing the calls.