‘Stellar Wind’ routinely eavesdropped on journalists and public officials

By Wayne Madsen

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.

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