Whistle Blowers coming out of the woodwork.

Thomas Drake US Whistleblower on 60 Minutes
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/05/22/60minutes/main20064396.shtml

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/05/22/thomas-drake-complained-about-michael-hayden-spending-1b-to-do-what-3m-could-do/
Thomas Drake complained about Michael Hayden spending 1 billion to do what 3 million could do.
Excerpt:
So Drake was complaining about a program that cost 300 times as much as the one he championed (ultimately, Trailblazer cost $1.2 billion, so actually 400 times as much). It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. Trailblazer, according to a government filing, worked across more platforms. ThinThread, according to a Siobhan Gorman story, had additional functionality, including privacy protections.
But still, Drake complained about a program that did what ThinThread did–at 300 to 400 times the cost.
As one of the other NSA employees who whistleblew about Trailblazer, J. Kirk Wiebe, explains,

“How does a man see 9/11 happened, know that some part of it is due to corruption and mismanagement and sleep at night. How does a man do that? He obviously couldn’t,” Wiebe told Pelley.

Yet the government wants to put Drake in jail for 35 years because he tried to make sure incompetence that led to 9/11 doesn’t continue.

May 22, 2011 8:20 PM

The Espionage Act: Why Tom Drake was indicted

(CBS News)  Nearly two years before 9/11, America's largest intelligence agency had recordings of three of the al Qaeda hijackers plotting an attack. But the information, obtained by the National Security Agency, wasn't analyzed in a way that could uncover the plot.

Inside the super-secret NSA, several analysts and managers believed the agency had a powerful tool that might have had a chance to head off 9/11. But it wasn't used.

One of those agency insiders was Thomas Drake, who thought taxpayer money was being wasted on useless intelligence gathering projects while promising technology was ignored.

Drake tried to get the word out. But now, as a result, he has been charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 and if convicted of all charges could spend the next 35 years of his life in prison. The government says he betrayed his country.

Drake says the only thing he betrayed was NSA mismanagement that undermined national security.

After a long career in U.S. intelligence, Drake never imagined he'd be labeled an enemy of the United States. As a young airman, he flew spy missions in the Cold War; in the Navy, he analyzed intelligence for the joint chiefs at the Pentagon.

Later, he worked for defense contractors in the highly technical world of electronic eavesdropping. He became an expert in sophisticated, top secret computer software programs and ultimately rose, in 2001, to a senior executive job at the NSA.

Drake told correspondent Scott Pelley his first day on the job was Sept. 11, 2001.

"NSA went into immediate crisis management mode. We had failed to protect the United States of America," he told Pelley.

Asked if he felt that was a failure of the NSA, Drake told Pelley, "The entire national security establishment - it was a failure, a fundamental systemic breakdown."

Extra: Spies and whistleblowers

Extra: Eavesdropping on the world

Extra: The anonymous source

Part of the failure at the NSA, the largest U.S. intelligence agency, was in its old technology. The agency eavesdrops on the communications of the world. But in the 1990s it was becoming ineffective, overwhelmed by the explosion of digital data.

"Vast volumes of data streaming across all kinds of different networks, wired, wireless, phones, computers, you name it," Drake explained.

"And what does that look like to NSA? Coming into building in Maryland?" Pelley asked.

"Choking on it," Drake said. "Just incredible amounts. Even just storing it was becoming a challenge."

Most of what the agency collected went unanalyzed, including clues pointing to 9/11. Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney were career NSA intelligence analysts who were working on the problem.

"We were greatly saddened and shocked by 9/11, but it didn't come as a total surprise. We knew there was a vulnerability, a lack of understanding of the data that put NSA in a weak position," Wiebe said.

Recognizing that vulnerability in the late 1990s, Binney, a legendary NSA mathematician, led development of a revolutionary computer system to collect, isolate and connect important information like phone calls and financial transactions. Its code name was "Thin Thread."

"Thin Thread was fundamentally dedicated to collecting and processing and ultimately analyzing the vast reams of digital data. It was a breakthrough solution," Drake explained.

Produced Glenn Silber and Graham Messick

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread

Excerpt:
ThinThread is the name of a project that the United States National Security Agency engaged in during the 1990s, according to a May 17, 2006 article in the Baltimore Sun.^[1] The program involved wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data, but according to the article, the program was discontinued after the September 11, 2001 attacks due to the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence authority.
According to science news site PhysOrg.com, ThinThread evolved into the Trailblazer Project which lacks the privacy protections of ThinThread.^[2] A consortium led by Science Applications International Corporation was awarded a $280 million contract to develop Trailblazer in 2002.^[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ridenhour_Prizes

Excerpt:
The Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize

• 2004 - Joseph Wilson
• 2005 - Kristen Breitweiser
• 2006 - Rick S. Piltz
• 2007 - Donald Vance
• 2008 - Matthew Diaz
• 2009 - Thomas Tamm
• 2010 - Matthew Hoh ^[1]
• 2011 - Thomas Andrews Drake

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysOrg
Excerpt:
PhysOrg is a popular science, research and technology news website specializing in the hard science subjects of physics, space and earth science, biology, chemistry, electronics, nanotechnology and technology in general. It is known for timely updates of scientific breakthroughs and press releases from major research labs and universities across the world. Occasionally it also publishes comprehensive articles on new peer-reviewed papers.

[edit] Description

The site was founded in March, 2004, by two Ph.D. students who wanted a science news service for informed and educated readers. In 2005 it was purchased by US-based Omicron Technologies.^[1] PhysOrg is registered as the property of Omicron Technology Limited of Douglas, Isle Of Man, in Great Britain.^[2]
It has a full-time staff of seven with six contributing writers. Its editor-in-chief is John Benson (UK) and managing editors are Andrew Zinin and Alexander Pol (NL).^[1][3]
In 2008, it published 75-100 news stories per day and hosted about 100,000 daily readers. It had 25,000 registered members.^[3]
In 2009, Quantcast listed it as a top 1,800 site with 880,000+ U.S. people visiting per month and this being 57% of all visitors. It said the site is popular among a more educated, older, somewhat male audience.^[4] Trends Updates named PhysOrg amongst the Top 25 Technology Blogs for 2008.^[5]


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Marcospinelli/national-security-strategy-board-obama-cameron-_n_865469_89465323.html
Excerpt:
Obama, Cameron To Start U.S.-Britain National Security Strategy Board

Read More: Britain, Afghanistan, Middle East, David Cameron, National Security Strategy Board, Us, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, World News

---

Marcospinelli: Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblower, was on 60 Minutes this

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Marcospinelli/national-security-strategy-board-obama-cameron-_n_865469_89465323.html

“Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblo­wer, was on 60 Minutes this evening. I’ll have more to say about his appearance and case going forward, but I just wanted to highlight a critical detail revealed by 60 Minutes: the relative cost of Trailblaze­r–the SAIC implemente­d program Michael Hayden championed­–and ThinThread­–the program Drake and others claim was more effective and had privacy protection­s.

One of them was Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, the head of the agency: he wanted to transform the agency and launched a massive modernizat­ion program, code named: “Trailblaz­er.” It was supposed to do what Thin Thread did, and more.
Trailblaze­r would be the NSA’s biggest project. Hayden’s philosophy was to let private industry do the job. Enormous deals were signed with defense contractor­s. [Bill] Binney’s Thin Thread program cost $3 million; Trailblaze­r would run more than $1 billion and take years to develop.
“Do you have any idea why General Hayden decided to go with Trailblaze­r as opposed to Thin Thread, which already existed?” Pelley asked.
“I believe he was convinced by others that going with a large-scal­e, industrial strength solution was the approach that NSA needed to take. You can’t really understand why they would make that kind of a decision without understand­ing the culture of NSA,” Drake said.
Asked to elaborate, Drake said, “Careers are built on projects and programs. The bigger, the better their career.” [my emphasis]

So Drake was complainin­g about a program that cost 300 times as much as the one he championed (ultimatel­y, Trailblaze­r cost $1.2 billion, so actually 400 times as much). It’s not an apples-to-­apples comparison­. Trailblaze­r, according to a government filing, worked across more platforms. ThinThread­, according to a Siobhan Gorman story, had additional functional­ity, including privacy protection­s.
But still, Drake complained about a program that did what ThinThread did–at 300 to 400 times the cost.
As one of the other NSA employees who whistleble­w about Trailblaze­r, J. Kirk Wiebe, explains,

“How does a man see 9/11 happened, know that some part of it is due to corruption and mismanagem­ent and sleep at night. How does a man do that? He obviously couldn’t,” Wiebe told Pelley.

Yet the government wants to put Drake in jail for 35 years because he tried to make sure incompeten­ce that led to 9/11 doesn’t continue.

http://emp­tywheel.fi­redoglake.­com/2011/0­5/22/thoma­s-drake-co­mplained-a­bout-micha­el-hayden-­spending-1­b-to-do-wh­at-3m-coul­d-do/”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Core
Excerpt:
Main Core is the code name of a database maintained since the 1980s by the federal government of the United States. Main Core contains personal and financial data of millions of U.S. citizens believed to be threats to national security.^[1] The data, which comes from the NSA, FBI, CIA, and other sources,^[1] is collected and stored without warrants or court orders.^[1] The database's name derives from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."^[1]
The Main Core database is believed to have originated with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1982, following Ronald Reagan's Continuity of Operations plan outlined in the National Security Directive (NSD) 69 / National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 55, entitled "Enduring National Leadership," implemented on September 14, 1982.^[1][2]
As of 2008 there are reportedly eight million Americans listed in the database as possible threats,^{[3][dead link]} often for trivial reasons,^{[4][dead link]} whom the government may choose to track, question, or detain in a time of crisis.^{[5][dead link]}
The existence of the database was first reported on in May 2008 by Christopher Ketcham and in July 2008 by Tim Shorrock.^[2]


http://www.altnews.info/tag/domestic-terrorism/
Excerpt:
While most of the N.S.A. was reeling on September 11th, inside SARC the horror unfolded “almost like an ‘I-told-you-so’ moment,” according to J. Kirk Wiebe, an intelligence analyst who worked there. “We knew we weren’t keeping up.” SARC was led by a crypto-mathematician named Bill Binney, whom Wiebe describes as “one of the best analysts in history.” Binney and a team of some twenty others believed that they had pinpointed the N.S.A.’s biggest problem—data overload—and then solved it. But the agency’s management hadn’t agreed.

Binney, who is six feet three, is a bespectacled sixty-seven-year-old man with wisps of dark hair; he has the quiet, tense air of a preoccupied intellectual. Now retired and suffering gravely from diabetes, which has already claimed his left leg, he agreed recently to speak publicly for the first time about the Drake case. When we met, at a restaurant near N.S.A. headquarters, he leaned crutches against an extra chair. “This is too serious not to talk about,” he said.
Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his algorithms were used after 9/11. ThinThread, the “little program” that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., “got twisted,” and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.” According to Binney, Drake took his side against the N.S.A.’s management and, as a result, became a political target within the agency.
…
Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”
Binney considers himself a conservative, and, as an opponent of big government, he worries that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program is so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.” Whereas wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, data mining is automated, meaning that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, U.S. officials could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he says. “It’s exactly what the Founding Fathers never wanted.”

Former NSA Genius Apologizes for His Super Spying Software (Gizmodo):

Long before 9/11, brilliant NSA crypto-mathematician Bill Binney had developed an algorithm to make sense of the unbelievably massive amounts of data American spies were pulling in—he called it ThinThread. And then it went very, very wrong.
ThinThread, the New Yorker reports, proved to be too good: designed to track foreign enemies via their electronic footprints, Binney was horrified to find that the powerful software processed mammoth amounts of American communications as well. Without a warrant—illegally. Binney implemented an encryption scheme that blurred out American chatter unless it was flagged by a judge, but his system was discarded by the NSA for being too invasive.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/50168.html
Excerpt:
Feds spy on reporter in leak probe

'We’ve argued that I was a victim of harassment by the government,' said James Risen. | AP Photo Close

By JOSH GERSTEIN | 2/24/11 11:06 PM EST Updated: 2/25/11 12:15 PM EST

Federal investigators trying to find out who leaked information about a CIA attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program obtained a New York Times reporter’s three private credit reports, examined his personal bank records and obtained information about his phone calls and travel, according to a new court filing.
The scope and intrusiveness of the government’s efforts to uncover reporter James Risen’s sources surfaced Thursday in the criminal case of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer facing federal criminal charges for allegedly disclosing classified information. Sterling is accused of giving Risen details about what Risen describes as the CIA’s plan to give Iran faulty nuclear blueprints, hoping to temporarily thwart the regime’s ambitions to build an atomic bomb.
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In a motion filed in federal court in Alexandria, Sterling’s defense lawyers, Ed MacMahon Jr. and Barry Pollack, reveal that the prosecution has turned over “various telephone records showing calls made by the author James Risen. It has provided three credit reports—Equifax, TransUnion and Experian—for Mr. Risen. It has produced Mr. Risen’s credit card and bank records and certain records of his airline travel.”

The revelation alarmed First Amendment advocates, particularly in light of Justice Department rules requiring the attorney general to sign off on subpoenas directed to members of the media and on requests for their phone records. And Risen told POLITICO that the disclosures, while not shocking, made him feel “like a target of spying.”
“We’ve argued that I was a victim of harassment by the government. This seems to bolster that,” Risen said. “Maybe I should ask them what my credit score is.”
Sterling’s attorneys and a Justice Department spokeswoman declined POLITICO’s request for comment.
The government’s interest in Risen’s sources for his 2006 book, “State of War,” has been known since 2008. In particular, investigators have zeroed in on a chapter which details what Risen describes as a botched CIA effort to trip up Iran’s nuclear program. The scheme involved using a Russian defector to deliver the faulty blueprints to the Iranians, but the defector blew the CIA’s plot by alerting the Iranians to the flaws — negating the value of the program, and perhaps even advancing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Risen was twice subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury to testify about his sources, but the first grand jury dissolved before a judge acted on Risen’s motion to quash the subpoena. Last year, U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema sided with Risen and quashed the second subpoena, though details of her reasoning haven’t been made public.
Soon after that decision, Sterling was indicted.
First Amendment advocates said the Justice Department’s use of business records to find out about Risen’s sources was troubling. Those records, they argue, could potentially expose a wide array of Risen’s sources and confidential contacts — information that might fall beyond the initial investigation that led to Sterling’s indictment.
“To me, in many ways, it’s worse than a direct subpoena,” said Jane Kirtley, a University of Minnesota law professor and former director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “Third-party subpoenas are really, really invidious…. Even if it is targeted, even if they’re trying to just look at the relevant stuff, they’re inevitably going to get material that exposes other things.”
Kirtley also said journalists often aren’t notified when the government asks telecom companies, banks or other service providers for their records.
Asked how journalists could credibly complain about such techniques when most also refuse more direct demands for information about their sources, Kirtley said reporters who become the focus of determined investigators face a “Hobson’s choice.”

http://abcnews.go.com/US/Blotter/cia-agent-jeffrey-sterling-arrested-accused-leaking-reporter/story?id=12557291
Excerpt:

By PIERRE THOMAS (@PierreTABC) , JACK CLOHERTY, JASON RYAN and LISA JONES

Jan. 6, 2011

Former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling was arrested today on charges that he leaked national defense information to the media and revealed the identity of a "human asset."
The motive, according to the Justice Department, was revenge.
Sterling, 43, worked for the CIA from May 1993 to January 2002, and for two years was assigned to "a classified clandestine operational program designed to conduct intelligence activities related to the weapons capabilities of certain countries," according to the indictment. During that time, he also was handling a "human asset" associated with that program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Merlin
Excerpt:
Operation Merlin is an alleged United States covert operation under the Clinton Administration to provide Iran with a flawed design for building a nuclear weapon in order to delay the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Alexander_Sterling
Excerpt:
Jeffrey Alexander Sterling is a former CIA employee, who was indicted and subsequently arrested under the Espionage Act for allegedly revealing details about Operation Merlin to journalist James Risen.^[1]

[edit] Education

Sterling earned a political science degree at Millikin University in Decatur, Il, in 1989. In 1992, he graduated from the School of Law at Washington University in St. Louis.^[2]

[edit] CIA employment

Jeffrey Alexander Sterling joined the CIA on 14 May 1993, and in 1995 became Operations Officer in the Iran Task force of CIA's Near East and South Asia division. He held a Top Secret security clearance and had access to Sensitive Compartmented Information, including classified cables, CIA informants and operations. After training in Persian in 1997 he was sent first to Bonn, Germany, and two years later to New York City to recruit Iranian nationals as agents for the CIA, as part of a secret intelligence operation related to the weapons capabilities of Iran. In April 2000, Sterling filed a complaint about racial discrimination practices by CIA management with CIA's Equal Employment Office. The CIA subsequently revoked Sterling's authorization to receive or possess classified documents concerning the secret operation, and placed him on administrative leave in March 2001.^[3][4] After the failure of two settlement attempts, his contract with the CIA was terminated on 31. January 2002.^[5]

[edit] Equal Employment law suit

Sterling's law suit accusing CIA officials of racial discrimination was dismissed by the judge invoking the State secrets privilege, as the litigation would have required the disclosure of classified information. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal, ruling in 2005 that “there is no way for Sterling to prove employment discrimination without exposing at least some classified details of the covert employment that gives context to his claim.”^[6][7][8][9]

[edit] Indictment and arrest under the Espionage Act

Between 2002 and 2004 the U.S. federal government intercepted several interstate emails to and from Sterling, which were "(...) routed through a server located in the Eastern District of Virginia (...)". The authorities also traced telephone calls between Sterling and - according to a senior government official^[1] - the journalist and book author James Risen. In the intercepted communications Sterling allegedly revealed national defense information to an unauthorized person.^[5]
On 22 Dec 2010, U.S. attorney Neil H. MacBride filed an indictment against Jeffrey Alexander Sterling on the Unlawful Retention and Unauthorized Disclosure of National Defense Information, Mail Fraud, Unauthorized Conveyance of Government Property, and Obstruction of Justice. Sterling was arrested on 6 January 2011.^[5] Sterling became the fifth individual in the history of the United States who has been charged under the Espionage Act with mishandling national defense information.^{[10][11][12][2]}
In a hearing at the U.S. District Court on 14 Jan 2011, Sterling's defense attorney Edward MacMahon entered a not guilty plea.^[13][14] MacMahon reported to the court that he was still waiting for clearance to discuss the case in detail with his client.^[15]

[edit] Awards

Sterling earned a national 2010 Anti-Fraud Award from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association for helping break up a Medicare fraud ring, leading to estimated recoveries and savings of US$ 32 million.^[2][16]


http://mensnewsdaily.com/2009/06/15/operation-merlin-clinton-cia-helped-irans-nuclear-program/
Excerpt:

Operation Merlin: Clinton, CIA Helped Iran’s Nuclear Program

2009-06-15

By Jim Kouri, CPP

by Jim Kouri
Radio talk show host and former US Justice Department official Mark Levin shocked many listeners when he reported that President Bill Clinton gave nuclear technology to the Iranians in a harebrained scheme.
He said that the transfer of classified data to Iran was personally approved by then-President Clinton and that the CIA deliberately gave Iranian physicists blueprints for part of a nuclear bomb that likely helped Tehran advance its nuclear weapons development program.

http://cryptome.org/0001/cia-merlin.htm
Excerpt:
29 April 2010

---

Related:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/us/29justice.html
U.S. Subpoenas Times Reporter Over Book on C.I.A.
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: April 28, 2010
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is seeking to compel a writer to testify about his confidential sources for a 2006 book about the Central Intelligence Agency, a rare step that was authorized by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
The author, James Risen, who is a reporter for The New York Times, received a subpoena on Monday requiring him to provide documents and to testify May 4 before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., about his sources for a chapter of his book, “State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration.” The chapter largely focuses on problems with a covert C.I.A. effort to disrupt alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research. ...
Justice Department was seeking information only about Mr. Risen’s sources for the ninth chapter, which centers on the C.I.A.’s effort to disrupt Iranian nuclear research. That material did not appear in The Times.
The book describes how the agency sent a Russian nuclear scientist — who had defected to the United States and was secretly working for the C.I.A. — to Vienna in February 2000 to give plans for a nuclear bomb triggering device to an Iranian official under the pretext that he would provide further assistance in exchange for money. The C.I.A. had hidden a technical flaw in the designs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Risen
Excerpt:
Risen and Eric Lichtblau were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2006 for a series of controversial investigative reports that they co-wrote about the National Security Agency's surveillance of international communications originating or terminating in the United States codenamed "Stellar Wind" and about a government program called Terrorist Finance Tracking Program designed to detect terrorist financiers, which involved searches of money transfer records in the international SWIFT database.^[1][2] Risen then was the subject of an illegal search in the Jeffrey Sterling trial, in which the DOJ attempted to use it's illegal behavior in another case to force Risen to testify against Sterling. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/06/AR2011010604001.html
The White House Press Office issued a statement on August 6, 2007 that the New York Times article on the Congressional and Presidential approval of a six-month extension of terrorism monitoring in the United States was misleading.^{[citation needed]}

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_wind_(code_name)
Excerpt:
Stellar Wind is the open secret code name for certain information collection activities performed by the United States' National Security Agency and revealed by Thomas M. Tamm to New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau.^[1]. The operation was approved by President George W. Bush shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001.^[2]
The information collection activities involved data mining electronic data about tens of millions of American citizens within the United States. This data included information about e-mail communications, phone conversations, financial transactions, and internet activity.^[1]
There were internal disputes within the Justice Department about the legality of the program, since overcollection of data meant data was collected for large numbers of people, not just the subjects of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants.^[3] In March 2004 the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft ruled that program was was illegal. The day after the ruling Ashcroft became critically ill with acute pancreatitis. Bush sent White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and chief of staff Andrew Card Jr. to Ashcroft's hospital bed where Ashcroft lay semiconscious to request that he sign a document reversing the Justice Department's ruling but they were forced to leave because Ashcroft was incapable of signing the document. Bush then reauthorized the operation over formal Justice Department objections. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller, Acting Attorney General James Comey and nearly the whole top level of the Justice Department were prepared to resign over the matter. According to Valerie Caproni the FBI general counsel "From my perspective, there was a very real likelihood of a collapse of government." Bush then reversed the authorization.^[2]
During the Bush Administration the Steller Wind cases were referred by FBI agents as "pizza cases" because seemingly suspicoius cases turned out to be food takeout orders. While around 99 percent of the cases lead nowhere 1 percent bear fruit.^[2] One of the known uses of this data was the creation of suspicious activity reports or "SARS" about people who may or may not have been suspected of terrorist activities. It was one of these SARS that tipped FBI agents to former NY governor Elliot Spitzer's use of prostitutes even though he was not suspected of terrorist activities.^[1]

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/01/27/main-core-promis-and-the-shadow-governme-1
Main-Core, Promis and the shadow Government.
Excerpt:
George Orwell so accurately predicted Big Brother is now watching over us, protecting us and ensuring that we understand that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.
But I digress...
Main Core has received attention in two 2008 articles, one a piece by investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham entitled The Last Roundup (which also looks at Continuity of Government programs but more on that in a little while) and Tim Shorrock entitled Exposing Bush's Historic Abuse of Power. Both articles tie Main Core to the now legendary PROMIS software, an extremely advanced program designed to aid federal prosecutors in case management tracking. PROMIS could pull and put together a wide range of data from disparate sources into a single record. The PROMIS software was created by INSLAW Inc., a company owned by a former NSA intelligence officer named William Hamilton. PROMIS was to have been licensed to the U.S. government in the early 1980's before the technology boom became widespread but was then stolen by the seamy officials in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department. The software was modified for espionage purposes to include a 'back door' that could be used for spying on those that it was sold to and in a detail that should be especially relevant with the economic crisis that threatens to crash the global financial system, the software could also be used to track in real time (in order to manipulate?) stock market transactions, once can certainly speculate as to how such a tool could have contributed to an economic catastrophe as we are now facing if it were used for such a thing. It is important to keep in mind the period when PROMIS was stolen in the early 1980's and the fact that the techology boom was still years in the future which should give one an idea to just how far advanced and therefore how important that it was to those who would use it in order to promote a sinister agenda.
Mr. Shorock's piece goes into the relationship between PROMIS and Main Core in some detail:

According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main Core, which he first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in government and the private sector, says there are strong indications that the Bush administration's domestic surveillance operations use Main Core.

^{http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/176822.html
Excerpt:}

In all likelihood, smartphone geolocation data has now been added to the dossier creation mix, another component of the secret state's massive national security index called "Main Core" by investigative journalists Christopher Ketchum and Tim Shorrock.

As Ketchum reported in his 2008 piece, three unnamed former intelligence officials told him that “8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect” and, in the event of a national emergency, "could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention."

We've now learned that Apple's iPhone and iPad and Google's Android smartphone platforms "constantly track users' physical location and store the data in unencrypted files that can be read by anyone with physical access to the device," The Register disclosed.