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Authors: Shane Harris
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allowed to monitor communications inside the United States, so long as one end of that communication was outside the country and the communication was reasonably believed to be associated with terrorism. The NSA would not have to seek permission from a court to monitor individual phone numbers or e-mails, a legal process that historically had taken four to six weeks. Now it could engage in hot pursuit of as many communications as it pleased, so long as they fit within the boundaries of the executive orderâand the NSAâs computer systems could process them all.
Bush signed the order on October 4, 2001.
Â
The NSA was going to war, and it set to work right away on its new campaign. A twenty-four-hour watch center was set up, called the Metadata Analysis Center, or MAC.It was situated in the Signals Intelligence Directorate, the part of the NSA that steals or intercepts digital communications. A group of experienced NSA analysts and engineers were put on the new team; they all had to sign nondisclosure agreements. They were given office space. And the program was given a code name, or âsecurity compartmentâ: Starburst. A new name, Stellar Wind, would come a few weeks later, on October 31, 2001. The program also got a hefty dose of new hardware: fifty computer servers to store and process all the new data Starburst collected. The agency didnât want a record of it suddenly buying a lot of new equipment. So officials asked a server vendor to divert a shipment intended for another recipient to the NSA instead, and to tell no one. The servers arrived at Fort Meade under police escort on October 13.
Hayden told the new Starburst team members during meetings on October 6 and 7 that the emergency, warrantless collection of communications involving people in the United States was temporary. But that was belied by the programâs $25 million budget, a large amount of money to spend on a program that was only supposed to last thirty days.
Nearly ninety NSA employees were cleared for access within the first week of the programâs operations. Two staffers in the NSAâs Office of General Counsel reviewed the programâafter Bush signed the orderâand determined that it was legal. The office didnât document its opinions or legal rationale.
By October 7, three days after Bush had signed the order, the MAC was running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, crunching metadata sucked up by NSAâs electronic filters. Twenty analysts and software developers worked in three shifts. Many of the MAC employees had manually built call chains of Russian intelligence targets during the Cold War. Now this process was being automated and applied to al-Qaeda and its affiliates, its financial and political supporters, and would-be recruits.
The contact chain of an individual target could stretch into the millions of people if an analyst wanted to look at every single person in that targetâs contact list, along with all
their
contacts. The analysts called each link in the chain a âhop.â Following one hop to the next, to see who might be connected to the original target, was reminiscent of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which players try to connect the prolific actor to some other actor who appeared in one of his films or TV shows. Hayden got a briefing from the MAC once a week, and his deputy got one every night, a measure of its supreme importance in the new intelligence war on terrorism.
The MAC had other partners at the NSA and outside the secret confines of Fort Meade. The spy agency set up a counterterrorism âproduct lineâ to send specific tasks to the MAC and conduct analysis of what was found in the contact chains. The FBI and the CIA got involved, providing leads to the MAC, which conducted contact chaining inside the United States. Telephone and Internet companies also started sending the NSA contentâthe recorded words of a phone call or the written
Bush signed the order on October 4, 2001.
Â
The NSA was going to war, and it set to work right away on its new campaign. A twenty-four-hour watch center was set up, called the Metadata Analysis Center, or MAC.It was situated in the Signals Intelligence Directorate, the part of the NSA that steals or intercepts digital communications. A group of experienced NSA analysts and engineers were put on the new team; they all had to sign nondisclosure agreements. They were given office space. And the program was given a code name, or âsecurity compartmentâ: Starburst. A new name, Stellar Wind, would come a few weeks later, on October 31, 2001. The program also got a hefty dose of new hardware: fifty computer servers to store and process all the new data Starburst collected. The agency didnât want a record of it suddenly buying a lot of new equipment. So officials asked a server vendor to divert a shipment intended for another recipient to the NSA instead, and to tell no one. The servers arrived at Fort Meade under police escort on October 13.
Hayden told the new Starburst team members during meetings on October 6 and 7 that the emergency, warrantless collection of communications involving people in the United States was temporary. But that was belied by the programâs $25 million budget, a large amount of money to spend on a program that was only supposed to last thirty days.
Nearly ninety NSA employees were cleared for access within the first week of the programâs operations. Two staffers in the NSAâs Office of General Counsel reviewed the programâafter Bush signed the orderâand determined that it was legal. The office didnât document its opinions or legal rationale.
By October 7, three days after Bush had signed the order, the MAC was running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, crunching metadata sucked up by NSAâs electronic filters. Twenty analysts and software developers worked in three shifts. Many of the MAC employees had manually built call chains of Russian intelligence targets during the Cold War. Now this process was being automated and applied to al-Qaeda and its affiliates, its financial and political supporters, and would-be recruits.
The contact chain of an individual target could stretch into the millions of people if an analyst wanted to look at every single person in that targetâs contact list, along with all
their
contacts. The analysts called each link in the chain a âhop.â Following one hop to the next, to see who might be connected to the original target, was reminiscent of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which players try to connect the prolific actor to some other actor who appeared in one of his films or TV shows. Hayden got a briefing from the MAC once a week, and his deputy got one every night, a measure of its supreme importance in the new intelligence war on terrorism.
The MAC had other partners at the NSA and outside the secret confines of Fort Meade. The spy agency set up a counterterrorism âproduct lineâ to send specific tasks to the MAC and conduct analysis of what was found in the contact chains. The FBI and the CIA got involved, providing leads to the MAC, which conducted contact chaining inside the United States. Telephone and Internet companies also started sending the NSA contentâthe recorded words of a phone call or the written
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