HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019555.jpg
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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
Extracted Information
Dates
Document Details
| Filename | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019555.jpg |
| File Size | 0.0 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 85.0% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 2,553 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-04T16:38:39.194900 |