News

Report: Declassified Documents Reveal Massive CIA Spying Program Collecting Information On Americans

capitolhilltim

Recently declassified documents show the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), has secretly collected private information on Americans over many years without their knowledge. This was done through a huge surveillance program.

According to reports, the program was operated without Congress approval or court approval.

Not to mention the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against warrantless searches.

Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, both Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have called for “critically needed” transparency on the program.

They sent a note to Avril Hayes, director of national Intelligence, and William Burns on April 13th 2021. The letter was later declassified.

In it, they accuse the CIA of conducting the program “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 that comes from FISA collection.”

American Civil Liberties Union tweeted that the new reports “raise serious questions about what information of ours the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans.”

“This invasion of our privacy must stop,” they added.

RELATED: Tucker Carlson Claims Biden’s NSA Is Spying On Him In Surprising Accusation

Snowden warns us

In light of the report showing the CIA collecting private data on American en masse, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who rose to prominence by working with Edward Snowden to reveal unconstitutional spying programs, harshly criticized the agency as a “criminal organization.”

“The CIA is a criminal organization,” he tweeted. “Their interference in US politics is particularly pernicious.”

Greenwald pointed out that the media often uses CIA analysts as commentators on the “news.”

“Maybe journalists should be skeptical of their planted stories?” he suggested.

Edward Snowden (NSA whistleblower) shared the CIA mass-surveillance of private data story calling it “huge.”

Fox News reports on the operation of the bulk surveillance program under Executive Order 12333. It was signed first by President Ronald Reagan, in 1981.

In 2008, President George W. Bush amended the order through Executive Order 13470. This strengthened the position of Director of National Intelligence.

“The CIA and National Security Agency have a foreign mission and are generally barred from investigating Americans or U.S. businesses,” Fox reports. “But the spy agencies’ sprawling collection of foreign communications often snares Americans’ messages and data incidentally.”

RELATED: White House Admits They’re Actively Working With Facebook To Flag ‘Disinformation’

Americans Are Being Warranted to Search Backdoors

Wyden (D-OR), Heinrich (D-NM), called for greater transparency regarding bulk surveillance conducted by the CIA on private data.

“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,” they said.

“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,” a press release from the lawmakers reads.

This is what could possibly go wrong. Let’s focus on today, as an example.

Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden tweeted not that long ago that it would be a “good idea” to send unvaccinated Trump supporters to Afghanistan.

Imagine if someone like this had private information about Americans, their vaccination status, and more, all while they were working at the CIA.

The senators from the Democratic Party did not disclose what data was being gathered by the CIA program.

An intelligence official insists the Senate Intelligence Committee was already aware of the agency’s classified collection of the data, if not the sources used or the data itself.

In their letter from 2021, Wyden and Heinrich pressed the CIA to reveal the kinds of records it was collecting and “the rules governing the use, storage, dissemination and queries (including U.S. person queries) of the records.”

Last summer, Fox News host Tucker Carlson received a fair share of criticism for claiming a whistleblower within the United States government provided information that the Biden administration – particularly the NSA – had been spying on his texts and emails as a means “to take this show off the air.”

“It’s illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens, it’s a crime,” Carlson stated at the time. “It’s not a third-world country. Things like that should not happen in America.”

“If they are doing it to us – and again, they are definitely doing it to us – they are almost certainly doing it to others,” he said. “This is scary, and we need to stop it right away.”