New govt report shows how they subverted the constitution so the NSA could spy on everyone

A new report titled "Unclassified report on the president's surveillance program" documents the secret NSA program code-named Stellarwind. The report was a joint project in 2009 by inspectors general for five intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Mass surveillance of Americans was authorized by President George W. Bush under the ‘President's Surveillance Program’ (PSP).

It was withheld from the public until now!

The U.S. govt released a redacted version to The New York Times in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The report explains how the Bush administration came to tell the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, Royce C. Lamberth, about the program’s existence in early 2002.

James A. Baker, who was the DOJ's top intelligence lawyer, had not been told about the program. The report says he came across “strange, unattributed” language in an application for an ordinary surveillance warrant and figured it out, then insisted on telling Judge Lamberth.

Mr. Baker is now the general counsel to the FBI.

It also says that Mr. Baker developed procedures to make sure that warrant applications using information from Stellarwind went only to the judges who knew about the program: first Judge Lamberth and then his successor, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

 

The White House would not let Judge Kollar-Kotelly keep a copy of a letter written by a DOJ lawyer, John C. Yoo, explaining the claimed legal basis of the program, and it rejected a request by Attorney General 

John Ashcroft

 to tell his deputy, Larry Thompson, about the program.

 

The report said that the secrecy surrounding the program made it less useful. Very few working-level C.I.A. analysts were told about it. After the warrantless wiretapping part became public, Congress legalized it in 2007; the report said this should have happened earlier to remove “the substantial restrictions placed on FBI agents’ and analysts’ access to and use of program-derived information due to the highly classified status” of Stellarwind.

 

In 2003, after Mr. Yoo left the govt, other DOJ officials read his secret memo approving the program — most of which has not been made public — and concluded that it was flawed.

The FBI analyzed warrantless wiretapping from 2001 till 2004 and came to the conclusion that only 1.2 percent of the data gathered helped in fight against terrorists. Two years later the bureau found no data collected from 2004 till 2006 was useful.

 

In 2004, several DOJ officials confronted Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, in the hospital room of Mr. Ashcroft over the legality of the program. The officials included Mr. Thompson’s successor as deputy attorney general, James B. Comey, who is now the FBI director, and the new head of the office where Mr. Yoo had worked, Jack Goldsmith.

 

Another part of the newly disclosed report provides an explanation for a change in FBI rules during the Bush administration. Previously, FBI agents had only two types of cases: “preliminary” and “full” investigations. But the Bush administration created a third, lower-level type called an “assessment.”

At this level agents were told to scrutinize phone numbers believed to be suspicious. It was not necessary to explain why the numbers were deemed so. The agents were warned they should “use the information in legal or judicial proceedings.” 

Inspectors, who authored the report confessed they “had difficulty evaluating the precise contribution of the PSP to counterterrorism efforts because it was most often viewed as one source among many available analytic and intelligence-gathering tools in these efforts.”

 

This development, it turns out, was a result of Stellarwind. FBI agents were asked to scrutinize phone numbers deemed suspicious because of information from the program. But the agents were not told why the numbers had been deemed suspicious, only “not to use the information in legal or judicial proceedings.”

 

That made some agents uncomfortable, and it was not clear how such mysterious leads fit into their rules for investigations. The DOJ created the new type of investigation, initially called a “threat assessment,” which could be opened with lower-grade tips. Agents now use them 

tens of thousands of times a year

.