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Newsweek: The Fed who blew the whistle on warrantless domestic spying. Must-read.
Two knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that the clash erupted over a part of Bush's espionage program that had nothing to do with the wiretapping of individual suspects. Rather, Comey and others threatened to resign because of the vast and indiscriminate collection of communications data. These sources, who asked not to be named discussing intelligence matters, describe a system in which the National Security Agency, with cooperation from some of the country's largest telecommunications companies, was able to vacuum up the records of calls and e-mails of tens of millions of average Americans between September 2001 and March 2004. The program's classified code name was "Stellar Wind," though when officials needed to refer to it on the phone, they called it "SW." (The NSA says it has "no information or comment"; a Justice Department spokesman also declined to comment.)
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.
Back in December 2005, based on reading media reports, I wrote, "I think the theory discussed here may be partly correct. The means by which the administration got 'probable cause' to go to the FISA court for warrants on specific individuals or US phone numbers may have involved some sort of large scale data mining or link analysis involving capturing communications from Americans who had done nothing but call a certain country, in a way that the courts would likely determine 'unreasonable search and seizure.' From the mined data, they got a target list of US person numbers or individuals. What I presumed is that the administration never went to the FISA court at that point, but this FISA judge resignation story suggests perhaps they did, disguising the means by which they got 'probable cause' on some of those they were seeking warrants on."