[JURIST] The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence [official website] said Friday that it is investigating allegations made by two members of the US military that the National Security Agency (NSA) [official website] eavesdropped on the personal conversations of members of the military and humanitarian aid workers stationed in the Middle East. The allegations were made by Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk, who worked as Arab linguists for the Army and Navy respectively, in an interview [recorded video; report] with ABC News Thursday. In the interview, Faulk recounted listening to private conversations that had been passed around by other operators in the office he worked in, while Kinne said she listened to conversations from members of the International Red Cross [official website] and Doctors without Borders [advocacy website]. The NSA has said that it found some of the allegations to be without support, and that it is still investigating others. According to a spokesperson for General Michael Hayden [official profile], the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [official website] and who was head of the NSA at the time of the allegations, Hayden did not authorize nor did he have knowledge of the interception of private conversations. AP has more.

In July President Bush signed into law [press release] a bill amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) [text; JURIST news archive] to grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies participating in the NSA warrantless surveillance program [JURIST news archive].