The Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News has obtained a declassified version of an interim report on an inquiry into warrantless NSA surveillance issued this past fall, a teaser for a comprehensive report by the intelligence community's inspectors general due this summer. (The declassified version, apparently, is identical to the original submitted two months prior, but for one mysterious sentence.) While it's mostly limited to an account of how the agencies are divvying up the reporting task, even that provides a hint of the the departments' roles in the program itself.

That final report, mandated by Congress as part of last year's amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is supposed to provide a detailed account of how the National Security Agency's program of extrajudicial communications intercepts and data mining—here dubbed simply "the Program"—changed and operated from 2001, through its exposure in 2005 and eventual subordination to the FISA court.

By this point we have a rough portrait of various components of the program, thanks to whistleblowers like Russ Tice and Thomas Tamm, but on many crucial points observers have had to resort to informed speculation based on what they could cobble together from the dribs and drabs of information that have leaked out.

The interim report, unfortunately, doesn't hint at any of those juicy details, but only lays out the division of labor between the agencies. Most of the heavy lifting appears to be relegated to the Justice Department's IG, which as of November had apparently already been working on a broad review of the Program for some 18 months—well before Congress handed down its mandate. This will include an analysis of "any use of Program information in the FISA process"—something reputed to have been a sticking point when the chief judge on the FISA Court, who had been made aware of the Program, began to suspect that the Court was being used to launder illicit intercepts.

The report also suggests that the operational details of the Program—which we now know to have gone by the codename Stellar Wind—changed in response to the shifting legal opinions and presidential authorizations that supported it over the years. It alludes, for instance, to the role of the National Counterterrorism Center in "drafting and coordinating the threat assessments and legal certifications supporting periodic reauthorization of the Program" and "identifying targets and tasking Program collection."

The NCTC, it bears noting, did not even exist until 2003 (when it was originally dubbed the Terrorist Threat Integration Center). The Office of the Secretary of Defense is referenced in connection with the "establishment and implementation of the Program," suggesting that the early incarnations of Stellar Wind fell under the aegis of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with responsibility shifting to the Director of National Intelligence after the office was created in 2005, and occupied in turn by John Negroponte and former NSA head Michael McConnell.

The final report, due in July, will be compiled from the individual IG reports by the Central Intelligence Agency's Inspector General.

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