Unclassified Report on the President's Surveillance Program
Offices of Inspectors General of the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Report No. 2009-0013-AS · 10 July 2009
The official account of the warrantless surveillance programme, written by the five inspectors general who had access to the classified record and required by statute to report to Congress. It is the document the case file is built on, and it is short enough to read in an evening.
Open the PDF — 43 pages, 2.7 MB
Hosted here in full. Nothing has been re-compressed, re-OCR’d or altered.
What is on which page
p.2 (Preface)
Why the report exists at all. “Title III of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act of 2008 required the Inspectors General (IGs) of the elements of the Intelligence Community that participated in the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP) to conduct a comprehensive review of the program.” This was not a voluntary disclosure; Congress compelled it, and named the four committees it had to be delivered to.
p.10
The naming problem, in the report’s own words. It calls the publicly-confirmed interception the “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” and everything else authorised under the same Presidential Authorizations the “Other Intelligence Activities” — whose “specific details remain highly classified.” Together they “comprise the PSP,” reauthorised “at intervals of approximately every 45 days.”
pp.15–17
The legal architecture, and its author. John Yoo’s Office of Legal Counsel memoranda are summarised directly: FISA “cannot restrict the President’s ability to engage in warrantless searches that protect the national security,” and Congress had not made a clear statement restricting the President’s Commander-in-Chief authority. The report notes Yoo also addressed the Other Intelligence Activities — the parts still classified.
pp.25–28
The hospital room. The March 2004 crisis in sequence: Ashcroft admitted to George Washington University Hospital with severe gallstone pancreatitis; Goldsmith advising Comey that a “clear basis” existed for transferring the Attorney General’s powers; and on 10 March, President Bush instructing Gonzales and Card to go to the hospital, where Ashcroft was in intensive care recovering from surgery. The timing is sourced to notes from Ashcroft’s FBI security detail: Card called the hospital at 6:20 p.m.
Note. The codename STELLAR WIND does not appear anywhere in this document. We searched the text layer of all 42 pages that carry one, for “stellar wind”, “stellarwind” and the bare word “stellar”: no match. The one page without a text layer is the cover, which we rendered and read. In 2009 the codename was still classified; the report uses “President’s Surveillance Program,” “Terrorist Surveillance Program” and “Other Intelligence Activities” instead. If you are searching this PDF for the name the case file uses, that is why you will not find it. A separate NSA Inspector General working draft (ST-09-0002) that does use the codename was disclosed by Edward Snowden in 2013 and published by The Guardian; it was never officially declassified, and we do not host it.
Provenance and licence
Released by: Offices of Inspectors General of the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Report No. 2009-0013-AS.
Original copy: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General. We did not obtain this document; we are hosting a copy so that the citation in the case file resolves to something durable.
Licence: Public domain — work of the U.S. federal government. The cover is marked UNCLASSIFIED.
How this copy was checked: Downloaded from the DOJ Inspector General's own server. Page 1 was rendered and read: title, date 10 July 2009, report number 2009-0013-AS, and the five IG seals. The quoted passages were located by page in the document's own text layer.
43 pages · 2.7 MB · PDF