Corrente: Warrantless surveillance "Stellar Wind" data took down Eliot Spitzer. And very nicely timed that was, too...

Mon, 12/15/2008 - 10:51am — lambert

[Nobody seems to have noticed this, so I'll sticky it. I think the "Stellar Wind" story is interesting for many reasons, one of which is that it merges two stories we've followed for some time: warrantless surveillance and The Big Shit Storm. -- lambert]

A throwaway paragraph in Spiky's scoop:

[Under the secret and illegal "Stellar Wind" program of domestic warrantless surveillance,] NSA was also able to access, for the first time, massive volumes of personal financial records—such as credit-card transactions, wire transfers and bank withdrawals—that were being reported to the Treasury Department by financial institutions. These included millions of "suspicious-activity reports," or SARS, according to two former Treasury officials who declined to be identified talking about sensitive programs. (It was one such report that tipped FBI agents to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer's use of prostitutes.) These records were fed into NSA supercomputers for the purpose of "data mining"—looking for links or patterns that might (or might not) suggest terrorist activity.

Now, that's very, very interesting, isn't it?