

It's been three years since The New York Times first broke the news of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, based on information provided by an anonymous source.

Today the identity of the Times' Deep Throat is finally revealed to be a 56-year-old former prosecutor in the Justice Department named Thomas Tamm, whose "passion for justice" led him to make a fateful call to the Times one day in 2004 from a phone booth in a Washington, D.C., subway station.

The information is reported in a fascinating tale published not by the Times, but by Newsweek.

Newsweek describes how Tamm discovered the secret program and agonized about what to do before finally making the call to reporter Eric Lichtblau at the Times. It also details the depression and constant fear he's faced since then, knowing that he could be arrested any day and charged with a felony for revealing classified information.

Tamm was not the Times' only source, but was the first to come forward with news of the surveillance program. He was motivated by a need to do what was "right," and was stunned that someone higher up than him didn't speak up about the program. Tamm thought Congress and the public should know about the spying to debate its lawfulness. He was also motivated by anger over the administration's introduction of the controversial "enhanced" interrogation methods of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

He hails from a family of high-ranking FBI officials (his father and uncle were top aides to former FBI leader J. Edgar Hoover; his brother was an FBI agent and investigator for the 9/11 Commission), and he held a Top Secret/SCI clearance at the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, where he was tasked with processing national security wiretaps in cases targeting suspected spies and terrorists.

That's where he learned that some wiretap requests never made it to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for review and approval. Instead, he discovered, they went straight to Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FISA court's chief judge. These requests, he learned, related to something that people in his office called simply "the program."

Tamm told Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen about the program's existence, but provided no operational details because he didn't know how the program worked. Those details were provided to the Times by other sources.

Some revelations from the piece:

The code name for the NSA's phone call and e-mail collection program was "Stellar Wind."

The secret wiretap requests began in October 2001.

Tamm tried to discuss the issue with a former colleague who worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee but was shut down by the colleague who didn't want to discuss anything related to government secrets.

The secret wiretap requests went only to Ashcroft and the FISA court's chief judge, initially U.S. Judge Royce C. Lamberth but later Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, bypassing the other 10 judges on the court.

Targets for surveillance were chosen based on data obtained from computers and cellphones seized from Al Qaeda members overseas: If, for example, a Qaeda cell phone seized in Pakistan had dialed a phone number in the United States, the NSA would target the U.S. phone number–which would then lead agents to look at other numbers in the United States and abroad called by the targeted phone. Other parts of the program were far more sweeping. The NSA, with the secret cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies, had begun collecting vast amounts of information about the phone and e-mail records of American citizens. Separately, the NSA was also able to access, for the first time, massive volumes of personal financial records–such as credit-card transactions, wire transfers and bank withdrawals–that were being reported to the Treasury Department by financial institutions. These included millions of "suspicious-activity reports," or SARS, according to two former Treasury officials who declined to be identified talking about sensitive programs. (It was one such report that tipped FBI agents to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer's use of prostitutes.) These records were fed into NSA supercomputers for the purpose of "data mining"–looking for links or patterns that might (or might not) suggest terrorist activity.

Because intelligence obtained without a court order couldn't be used in criminal court, counterterrorism officials would examine the surveillance information already obtained without an order to find a reason for requesting a legitimate FISA warrant and cover their illegal tracks.

When FISA Judge Royce C. Lamberth learned that information from warrantless surveillance was showing up in court-reviewed FISA warrant requests he warned Justice officials to keep the information out of the warrant requests or he'd force a showdown by ruling on whether the program was legal or not. In doing so, Lamberth allowed the Justice Department to continue the warrantless wiretapping without challenge.

Tamm found nothing unique about the special wiretap requests to justify the runaround of the FISA court.

In early 2004, the FISA court's chief judge, Kollar-Kotelly, grew concerned that data obtained through warrantless wiretapping was still be being "backdoored" into legitimate FISA warrant requests and raised objections. Tamm was told she wanted to put an end to the special requests.

A handful of colleagues in the Justice Department expressed doubts to Tamm about the program being legal and one even ventured that Ashcroft could get indicted for it.

These days Tamm is self-employed as a sometimes-public defender, and is struggling with $30,000 in debt. He suffers from depression and waits in anguish to find out what will happen to him. A Justice Department prosecutor has told his lawyer that the department will wait to decide whether to prosecute him until the Obama administration takes office.

As* Newsweek* notes, the case presents a dilemma for Obama and his new attorney general, Eric Holder, since both condemned the warrantless wiretapping program when it came to light and now will have to decide whether Tamm is a hero or a traitor.

See also: