STELLARWIND was succeeded by four major lines of intelligence collection in the territorial United States, together capable of spanning the full range of modern telecommunications, according to the interviews and documents.

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Two of the four collection programs, one each for telephony and the Internet, process trillions of “metadata” records for storage and analysis in systems called MAINWAY and MARINA, respectively. Metadata includes highly revealing information about the times, places, devices and participants in electronic communication, but not its contents. The bulk collection of telephone call records from Verizon Business Services, disclosed this month by the British newspaper the Guardian, is one source of raw intelligence for MAINWAY.

The other two types of collection, which operate on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content. One of them intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called ­NUCLEON.

For Internet content, the most important source collection is the PRISM project reported on June 6 by The Washington Post and the Guardian. It draws from data held by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other Silicon Valley giants, collectively the richest depositories of personal information in history.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-surveillance-architecture-includes-collection-of-revealing-internet-phone-metadata/2013/06/15/e9bf004a-d511-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_story.html?hpid=z1

The program was in fact a wide range of covert surveillance activities authorized by President Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. At that time, White House officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, had become convinced that FISA court procedures were too cumbersome and time-consuming to permit U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to quickly identify possible Qaeda terrorists inside the country. (Cheney's chief counsel, David Addington, referred to the FISA court in one meeting as that "obnoxious court," according to former assistant attorney general Jack Goldsmith.) Under a series of secret orders, Bush authorized the NSA for the first time to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mails between the United States and a foreign country without any court review. The code name for the NSA collection activities—unknown to all but a tiny number of officials at the White House and in the U.S. intelligence community—was "Stellar Wind."

http://web.archive.org/web/20081216011008/http://www.newsweek.com/id/174601/output/print

No charges for man who leaked surveillance program

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has dropped its investigation into a former department attorney who tipped off the media about the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

The department informed Thomas Tamm’s attorneys that he will not be prosecuted for the leak that then-President George W. Bush called a breach of national security.

Tamm has said he called The New York Times about the program because it “didn’t smell right” and he thought the public had a right to know.

The Times won the Pulitzer Prize for its 2005 story exposing the program designed to catch terrorists by eavesdropping on international phone calls and emails of U.S. residents without court warrants.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/no-charges-for-man-who-leaked-surveillance-program/2011/04/26/AFt9o6rE_story.html