The secrecy surrounding the National Security Agency's post-9/11 warrantless surveillance and bulk data collection programme hampered its effectiveness, and many members of the intelligence community later struggled to identify any specific terrorist attacks it thwarted, a newly declassified document shows.
The document is a lengthy report on a once secret NSA programme, code-named Stellarwind. The report was a joint project in 2009 by inspectors general for five intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and it was withheld from the public at the time, although a short, unclassified version was made public. The government released a redacted version of the full report to The New York Times on Friday evening in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, President George W Bush secretly told the NSA that it could wiretap Americans' international phone calls and collect bulk data about their phone calls and emails without obeying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Over time, Stellarwind's legal basis evolved, and pieces of it emerged into public view, starting with an article in The Times about warrantless wiretapping in 2005.
The report amounts to a detailed history of the programme. While significant parts remain classified, it includes some new information. For example, it explains how the Bush administration came to tell the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the time of the September 11 attacks, Royce C Lamberth, about the programme's existence in early 2002.
James A Baker, then the Justice Department's top intelligence lawyer, had not been told about the programme. But he came across "strange, unattributed" language in an application for an ordinary surveillance warrant and figured it out, then insisted on telling Judge Lamberth. Baker is now the general counsel to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It also says that Baker developed procedures to make sure that warrant applications using information from Stellarwind went only to the judges who knew about the programme: 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 Justice Department lawyer, John C Yoo, explaining the claimed legal basis of the programme, and it rejected a request by Attorney General John Ashcroft to tell his deputy, Larry Thompson, about the programme.
The report said that the secrecy surrounding the programme made it less useful. Few working-level Central Intelligence Agency analysts were told about it. After the warrantless wiretapping part became public, Congress legalised 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 programme-derived information due to the highly classified status" of Stellarwind.
In 2003, after Yoo left the government, other Justice Department officials read his secret memo approving the programme and concluded that it was flawed.
The report said, Yoo's reasoning was premised on the assumption that the surveillance act, which requires warrants for national security wiretaps, did not expressly apply to wartime situations. His memo didn't mention that a provision of that law explains how it applies in war: The warrant rule is suspended for the first 15 days of a war.
The report has new details about a dramatic episode in March 2004, when several Justice Department officials confronted Alberto R Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, in the hospital room of Ashcroft over the legality of the programme. The officials included Thompson's successor as deputy attorney general, James B Comey, who is now the FBI director, and the new head of the office where Yoo had worked, Jack Goldsmith.
The showdown prompted Bush to make two or three changes to Stellarwind, the report said. But while the report gives a blow-by-blow account of the bureaucratic fight, it censors an explanation of the substance of the legal dispute and Bush's changes.
Last year, the Obama administration released a redacted version of a memo that Goldsmith later wrote about Stellarwind and similarly censored important details.
Nevertheless, it is public knowledge, because of documents leaked by the former intelligence contractor Edward J Snowden.
Snowden's disclosures included a working draft version of the NSA Inspector General's contribution to this report. The final document - with many passages redacted as still classified - was part of Friday's release.
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."
This development, it turns out, was a result of Stellarwind. FBI agents were asked to scrutinise phone numbers deemed suspicious because of information from the programme. 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. The Justice Department created the new type of investigation, initially called a "threat assessment," which could be opened with lower-grade tips.
But little came of the Stellarwind tips. In 2004, the FBI looked at a sampling of all the tips to see how many had made a "significant contribution" to identifying a terrorist, deporting a terrorism suspect, or developing a confidential informant about terrorists.
Just 1.2 percent of the tips from 2001 to 2004 had made such a contribution. Two years later, the FBI reviewed all the leads from the warrantless wiretapping between August 2004 and January 2006. None had proved useful.
Still, the report includes several redacted paragraphs describing "success" cases.
©2015 The New York Times News Service
