It was most likely a complete coincidence but it would be very interesting if anyone else has ever had a similar experience.
The same exact thing has happened during phone conversations I've had except with a different word. And I first noticed it years ago but it was post-9/11. When it happened I thought the phone call dropped by accident. I called back and picked up where I left off telling the same story. At the same word the call dropped again. I called back again and said "uhh, that was weird. Did you notice it cut off again when I said _______?" And the call dropped once more. At that point there was no plausible way it was a coincidence. The next time I called, I decided not to test it again.
I've been looking out ever since for some mention of this somewhere. Never saw one until now.
And if this one is blanked out, too, then you know I'm the newest addition to the Watchlist.
The word was "bomb".
(...Now that I think about it, I was at a train station. Not a major one though, doubt if that's related.)
I would imagine that foreign terrorists would speak in their native language. Any sophisticated terrorist would use code-words (Get on the train and trigger the Goat). Does the system pick up if you spell out a word?
It's certainly possible but there's not much reason why the phone calls would consistently drop unless that was their method of preventing terrorist activity.
It's known that all calls around the president are monitored for X miles, so the technology is certainly in place and in use.
For example, what he describes could be a bug on the "engage phone tracking when keyword is heard".
It's probably been fixed by now if it was a bug such as that. I'm sure bugs like this go unnoticed every day by people interacting with computer systems and just brush it off as a "glitch" or "service issue".
It's also not how the phone system works.
Which incidentally works very differently to the way most people seem to imagine phone tapping works -- some agents in trenchcoats in a dark room full of reel-to-reel tape recorders, wearing headphones and carefully putting crocodile clips onto a particular wire, and listening in, hoping the suspect isn't tipped off by crackles or beeps on the wire, or suspicious dropped calls. Maybe in 1950s Hollywood that was how it worked, but now the NSA is just grabbing the content and metadata wholesale from a backbone connection, and analysing at their leisure.
In the case of human monitoring, cutting the call off immediately is an odd response: usually both spooks and law enforcement would rather keep listening to get more information. An automated system might try to do that, but only one whose designers don't care if it's noticed: if my phone cuts off whenever I talk to a foreigner about a tour, I'm surely going to notice.
There could have been something fishy going on there, but it doesn't fit the usual threat models in non-dictatorial regimes.
Even if you were near the president and said on the phone or over a radio "Shoot the president's head" it could be completely justified depending on context (if you were a production crew talking to a camera operator for instance). It would be nearly impossible to sort out the false positives and even if you could it wouldn't prevent much because of code-words that could be used.
Then again, we all know that bugs happen, there might have been a new system in place. It would be conceivable that the phone/tower/something received a bad command when the "recording" started and it caused the call to drop.
I say "hacked" and "stolen" on the phone all the time, but those would likely be on the list of "calls to record".
Those are all probably just coincidences, but then again, it would also fit in the kind of behavior I'd expect to observe from spyware, either state-sponsored or just the usual kind. In any case, the NSA has made it very easy to become paranoid.