Declassified Report Shows Doubts About Value of N.S.A.’s Warrantless Spying
The report amounts to a detailed history of the program. 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 Sept. 11 attacks, Royce C. Lamberth, about the program’s existence in early 2002.
James A. Baker, then the Justice Department’s top intelligence lawyer, had not been told about the program. 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. Mr. Baker is now the general counsel to the F.B.I.
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 Justice Department 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 F.B.I. agents’ and analysts’ access to and use of program-derived information due to the highly classified status” of Stellarwind.
The report amounts to a detailed history of the program. 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 Sept. 11 attacks, Royce C. Lamberth, about the program’s existence in early 2002.
James A. Baker, then the Justice Department’s top intelligence lawyer, had not been told about the program. 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. Mr. Baker is now the general counsel to the F.B.I.
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 Justice Department 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 F.B.I. agents’ and analysts’ access to and use of program-derived information due to the highly classified status” of Stellarwind.