According to two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA has a secret program that collects information about Americans, and they want answers as to why the information is being gathered.
As reported by the Associated Press, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico penned a letter in April 2021 to intelligence officials demanding they declassify parts of the program and be overall more transparent about what type of data they collect from the public.
Parts of the letter were declassified and made available on Thursday, and while good swaths of the letter were still redacted, Wyden and Henrich reportedly wrote that the program “operated outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection.”
“It is critical that Congress not legislate without awareness of a … CIA program,” the letter partially read, “and that the American public not be misled into believe that the reforms in any reauthorization legislation fully cover the IC’s collection of their records.”
Kristi Scott, who serves as the CIA’s privacy and civil liberties officer, responded to this letter in a statement. “CIA recognizes and takes very seriously our obligation to respect the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. persons in the conduct of our vital national security mission,” Scott said. “CIA is committed to transparency consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.”
The CIA also shared a redacted version of a document issued by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which serves as an oversight committee for the organization. According to the document, the board did remind CIA analysts involved in the program that seeking out private information on U.S. citizens must be for a “foreign intelligence purpose.”
“These reports raise serious questions about the kinds of information the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans,” Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued. “The CIA conducts these sweeping surveillance activities without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress.”
The CIA strictly handles foreign affairs and as a result is technically forbidden from collecting U.S. data unless it is for a foreign mission. The agency has been criticized in the past for potentially violating these rules, such as when they secretly spied on Dr. Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders as part of “Operation Chaos,” which they justified by claiming the investigation was to figure out if the movement had links to other countries.
