CIA Still Spying on Americans Despite Legal Ban

As reported by Jacobinmag,

• We learned last Thursday that the CIA has been carrying out its own bulk surveillance program in the United States despite a legal ban on the agency carrying out domestic operations.
• The revelation came from a April 2021 letter made public by Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, calling on the CIA to make “extensive declassifications” about the program.
• The letter charges that the program was run “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight…”
• In other words, the CIA program doesn’t even have the patina of oversight that other mass surveillance programs do.
• The also letter notes, “this basic fact has been kept from the public and from Congress,” and the “nature and full extent of the CIA’s connection was withheld even from the Senate select committee on intelligence.”

This is the letter senators sent to top intelligence officials.

Also reported by AP: Senators: CIA has secret program that collects American data, where is is reported that CIA analysts who use the spying software are warned with “a pop-up box” telling them that “seeking any information about U.S. citizens or others covered by privacy laws requires a foreign intelligence purpose.” Yet “analysts are not required to memorialize the justification for their queries.”

Additional Sources

• Wyden and Heinrich: Newly Declassified Documents Reveal Previously Secret CIA Bulk Collection, Problems With CIA Handling of Americans’ Information
• Understanding the new CIA mass surveillance scandal