Stellar Wind: full transcription
// Why This Isn't An Outlier
This document isn't an isolated case. It's the same institutional habit the record shows repeating for eighty years.
Build the capability quietly. Use it at a scale the public never approved. Account for it only once a court forces the paperwork into daylight. The Classified Record traces that exact pattern from a 1946 screening memo to the 3.4 million warrantless searches the FBI ran in a single year, using the government's own documents, not speculation.
Get the book on Amazon →On October 4, 2001, President Bush authorized the NSA to conduct the surveillance activities that became Stellar Wind, on the asserted basis of his constitutional authority as commander-in-chief and the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed after 9/11. The authorization was reauthorized periodically, roughly every 45 days, upon recertification by the Attorney General.
When the nation has been thrust into an armed conflict by a foreign attack on the United States and the president determines in his role as commander in chief that it is essential for defense against a further foreign attack to use the capabilities of the National Security Agency within the United States, he has inherent constitutional authority to order warrantless wiretapping, an authority that Congress cannot curtail.
The program would have been more useful if it weren't so highly classified, since many FBI agents and CIA analysts were unaware it existed.
The New York Times published a story revealing that the Bush administration was conducting warrantless surveillance of Americans' international communications, after learning the administration was considering seeking a court injunction to block publication.
Rather than rebuke the White House for engaging in unilateral, warrantless surveillance, Congress chose to give its blessing to this system. By passing the Protect America Act in 2007, and then refining it as the FISA Amendments Act in 2008, Congress set up a system within FISA for warrantless surveillance of international communications, even though it knew full well this would lump surveillance of Americans in with the foreign surveillance FISA was originally designed to authorize.
This transcription covers the program's original authorization and legal theory, an internal DOJ Inspector General assessment of its operational limitations, its public exposure, and its legislative transformation into Section 702. The complete declassified 2009 report and subsequent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board reviews contain substantially more detail.
Program: Stellar Wind, NSA, authorized October 4, 2001.
Testimony: James Comey, Senate Judiciary Committee, May 15, 2007.
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