Classified 2002 Letter on NSA Eavesdropping Is Made Public

The Obama Administration made public a previously classified letter from 2002 about the Bush administration’s secret program that allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans’ international communications without court orders.

The release of the 22-page letter, written by John Yoo, then a top lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, adds to the historical record of one of the most controversial pieces of the Bush administration’s response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: The surveillance and bulk data collection program known by the code name Stellarwind. The letter explained to Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who at that time was the new chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, why the Justice Department considered the program lawful even though, as Yoo acknowledged, it clashed with wiretapping laws laid out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The letter appeared to track a memorandum Yoo had written in Nov. 2, 2001, soon after President George W. Bush directed the NSA to begin the program. A previously released inspector general report about the program included a partially redacted summary of that memo. Among other things, Yoo claimed in the letter that the president’s constitutional authority as commander-in-chief overruled statutory prohibitions and that under the circumstances the program complied with the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches and usually requires warrants.