This week on The Corbett Report we present a special audio and video edition of the podcast/vodcast. This week we delve into the true history of the illegal NSA wiretap program and how it connects to the bigger picture of government surveillance.

WMR has learned from U.S. intelligence sources that the FBI is continuing to investigate an “agency” official for leaking details of STELLAR WIND to the media. Although it is believed the agency in question is the National Security Agency (NSA), we have learned that there is also slight possibility that the agency individual in question may work at the Central Intelligence Agency. The leak occurred during the Bush administration and the investigation began while Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey were attorneys general but is continuing under Obama’s attorney general, Holder.

STELLAR WIND was billed by the Justice Department as the “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” but, in fact, was not targeting terrorists but journalists, government and contractor whistleblowers and politicians of both major parties, as well as independents. All information pertaining to STELLAR WIND was Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) and documents were marked: “White House Office-Controlled Document.” Under Obama, the program continues to exist with the only difference being that STELLAR WIND now has a different Top Secret code name since STELLAR WIND was compromised to the media.

National Security Agency (NSA) sources have reported to WMR that the signals intelligence agency’s warrantless wiretapping program was more widespread than originally reported and that it began shortly after the 2001 inauguration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, some six months prior to the 9/11 attacks.

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio reported that NSA requested that his firm take part in the warrantless wiretapping program in a February 27, 2001, meeting but that he told NSA that Qwest would refuse to participate. AT&T, BellSouth, SBC, Sprint, and Verizon all agreed to participate in the wiretapping program, which resulted in such a large database of intercepted calls, faxes, and e-mails, that NSA recently announced it was building a huge 1 million square feet data warehouse at a cost of $1.5 billion at Camp Williams in Utah, as well as another massive data warehouse in San Antonio. The cover story is that the warehouses are part of NSA’s new Cyber Command responsibilities. NSA sources have told WMR that the warehouses are to store the massive amount of intercepts collected by the ongoing Terrorist Surveillance Program, an above top secret program once code named STELLAR WIND by the NSA.

Nacchio was later convicted on 19 counts of insider trading of Qwest stock and sentenced to six years in federal prison. Nacchio maintained that his prosecution and conviction was in retaliation for his refusal to participate in the illegal NSA surveillance program. NSA also canceled a major contract with Qwest over its refusal to wiretap calls without warrants.

Pinwale, though, is actually an unclassified proprietary term used to refer to advanced data-mining software that the government uses. Contractors who do SIGINT mining work often include a familiarity with Pinwale as a prerequesite for certain jobs. To keep things straight, the American public now has confirmation of at least four separate NSA domestic surveillance programs. The first is the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which involves the monitoring of telephone calls. The second is "Stellar Wind," a code name for a program that involves meta-data mining. The third is a program that keeps tabs on all the information that flows through telecom hubs under the control of U.S. companies and within the U.S. The fourth is the Pinwale e-mail exploitation.

The warrantless National Security Agency (NSA) electronic eavesdropping program known to only a handful of Bush administration officials by its code name, Stellar Wind, and by a few other Justice Department officials only as “The Program,” routinely intercepted the communications and transactional data, including credit card usage, of journalists and public officials, according to sources familiar with the program.

WMR has learned from informed sources familiar with Stellar Wind that it was used to create a Richard Nixon-style “enemies list” and that one of the victims of the surveillance of this transactional data and communications traffic was New York’s then-Governor Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer’s Internet web page visits, e-mails, credit card transactions, and phone calls were all used by the Bush administration to discover his activities with a New York escort service and bring about his humiliation and resignation from office.