Declassified Report Shows Doubts About Value of N.S.A.’s Warrantless Spying
It doesn’t appear that anyone has posted this yet and I think the declassified document might make interesting reading. For some reason I wasn’t able to get the PDF to embed properly, so here’s a direct link (it’s fairly large— 63.2 MB—so it may take a few seconds to download). If you prefer, you can also read the embedded version on this page over at the New York Times.
I suggest reading the entire article at the source as it provides additional links and a synopsis of what’s in the 700+ page report.
Based on the article, it seems that (like the NYPD’s failed surveillance program) it was mostly a useless endeavor. I wonder how much it cost the taxpayers…
WASHINGTON — The secrecy surrounding the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 warrantless surveillance and bulk data collection program 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 N.S.A. program 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 Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush secretly told the N.S.A. 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. […]
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