Enlarge / Disclosing the warrantless surveillance program won Thomas Tamm the “Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling.” (credit: War on Whistleblowers/YouTube)

The Justice Department lawyer who disclosed the secret and warrantless surveillance program then-President George W. Bush adopted in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks was publicly censured Thursday by a federal appeals court for breaching legal ethics. As a Lawyer for the Justice Department’s Intelligence Policy and Review unit, Thomas Tamm violated professional conduct rules for disclosing to The New York Times “confidences” and “secrets,” the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit concluded. (PDF)

As part of his Justice Department duties, Tamm was tasked with requesting electronic surveillance warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals Board of Professional Responsibility said Tamm became aware in 2004 that certain applications to that FISA Court for national security surveillance authority “were given special treatment” and he leaked details of the program to the newspaper.

Tamm, who could have been disbarred, but now can continue practicing law as a Maryland state public defender (he resigned from the Justice Department in 2006), said he learned that “these applications derived from special intelligence obtained not pursuant to prior applications to the Court, but from an extra-judicial source referred to as ‘the program.'” After digging into it, he “concluded that it was probably illegal as it was not court-supervised.”