Two Democratic Senators said in a newly declassified letter that the Central Intelligence Agency is conducting a previously secret bulk data collection that captures Americans’ private information.
Sens Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, both on the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, addressed a letter to Director of National Intelligence Jim Burns and CIA Director Avril Haines on 13 April 2021.
The letter, which requested the declassifaction of a report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, was declassified on Thursday, and the Senators mentioned how both officials called for greater transparency in the intelligence community.
“The secret nature of the CIA’s activities in PCLOB report raise these very concerns,” the letter states.
The PCLOB was established in 2007 and is a bipartisan five-member board meant to oversee executive branch policies and actions.
Large parts of the letter are redacted but the letter notes how the history of activities shows that Congress has attempted to curb warrantless data collection but that the CIA has conducted its own bulk data collection program not unlike the ones Congress has sought to tame.
“It has done so entirely the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA collection,” they said in reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“FISA gets all the attention because of the periodic congressional reauthorizations and the release of DOJ, ODNI and FISA Court documents,” the Senators said in a statement in response to declassification.
“But what these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside the FISA law. In particular, these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.”
The letter noted that until the PCLOB report was delivered the month before the letter was sent, the nature of the CIA’s collection was withheld from the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Senators requested that the public should know the CIA’s relationship with its sources and its legal framework; the type of records collected, though part of that clause was redacted; and the amount of records maintained; the rules governing the use, storage, dissemination and queries of records.
“Each of these matters has been subject to extensive declassifications with regard to the NSA’s and FBI’s FISA collection,” they wrote. “There is no reason why CIA’s activities cannot be equally transparent.”
