Newsweek Exposes ‘Stellar Wind’ Program

Newsweek looks back at the battle between President Bush and the Justice Department about the scope and manner of one particular NSA surveillance program. The article describes a large data mining effort which analyzed patterns in email and phone traffic…

The NSA’s powerful computers became vast storehouses of “metadata.” They collected the telephone numbers of callers and recipients in the United States, and the time and duration of the calls. They also collected and stored the subject lines of e-mails, the times they were sent, and the addresses of both senders and recipients. By one estimate, the amount of data the NSA could suck up in close to real time was equivalent to one quarter of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica per second. (The actual content of calls and e-mails was not being monitored as part of this aspect of the program, the sources say.) All this metadata was then sifted by the NSA, using complex algorithms to detect patterns and links that might indicate terrorist activity.

The battle started when Jack Goldsmith at the US Justice Department reviewed the legal justification of the program and believed it to be illegal, an opinion which continues to be debatable.

The identity of the person who called The New York Times has also been revealed. It was Thomas Tamm (also at USDOJ), who was “motivated in part by his anger at other Bush-administration policies at the Justice Department.” Newsweek calls him a “whistleblower who exposed warrantless wiretaps”. It is ironic that Tamm was disturbed by the legality of the methods of intelligence gathering, while less concerned about his own disclosure of classified information to the press. Was there really no internal mechanism for dealing with his concerns?