Alleged insider offers classified NSA documents linking expanded 'Stellarwind' surveillance to post‑Bush era operations

String Puller | 67 to back up the charges he made that Stellarwind was an unlawful domestic surveillance operation. He could not have done so without violating his sworn oath and, for that matter, U.S. anti-espionage statutes. Binney made it clear to her and other journalists that he was not a lawbreaker. But her new source, C4, was willing to do what Binney (and other insiders) had refused to do. He was offer- ing in these e-mails to provide her with secret government docu- ments, even though it would implicate him as an outlaw. To further whet her appetite, he told her that these up-to-date NSA documents would fully substantiate the allegations that Binney made in her film. Even more important, he said Binney’s 2001 disclosures were still relevant to her cause. “What you know as Stellarwind has grown,” he wrote to her. “The expanded special source operations that took over Stellarwind’s share of the pie have spread all over the world to practically include comprehensive coverage of the United States.” In fact, as Snowden knew from the Inspector General report he had read, the NSA had terminated Stellarwind almost a decade earlier. President Bush ended it after top officials of the Justice © Department insisted that he did not have the legal authority for the © domestic part of Stellarwind. Instead, he asked Congress to revise FISA to meet the objections of the Justice Department. The result was the FISA Amendment Act of 2006. Unlike the previous Stel- larwind program, it did not permit domestic surveillance. It speci- fied that the government could not target any person in the United States or anywhere else in the world under this authority. Nor could it target any foreign person, even one residing outside of the United States, to acquire information from a particular known person inside the United States. As the act recognized that information about U.S. citizens might mistakenly be intercepted by the NSA, it required that such data about Americans be expunged in a bimonthly review by a Justice Department task force. Although the NSA program in place in 2013 was not the comprehensive domestic surveillance that Snowden claimed it to be, Poitras had no way of knowing at this early state that her source was misleading her. He offered to substantiate her worst fears about the growth of NSA surveillance: “I know the location of most domestic intercep- tion points, and that the largest telecommunication companies in the | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 67 ® 9/30/16 11:09 AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019555