Newly declassified documents reveal previously secret CIA bulk collection
wyden.senate.gov
wyden.senate.gov
You should be worrying about the NSA.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.[2]"
This doesn't even go to the FISA court, and they didn't tell the congressional oversight committees about it (all of whom have clearance to know/hear).
In my experience 0.03% is below rate of form-filling / typographical errors that don't get caught even with several proofreaders.
they're also the only meaningful oversight.
Trust Us.
The second statement does not logically follow from the first.
And. That link. Not clicking.
Yes it does, "it was not immediately apparent, so I did some research and it was x. Now you don't need to do the research."
And the CIA is mandated to produce such reports, while they could add malware it'd likely be more of a liability than a benefit.
> "it was not immediately apparent, so I did some research and it was x. Now you don't need to do the research."
If OP had written that, I'd have understood.
> And the CIA is mandated to produce such reports, while they could add malware it'd likely be more of a liability than a benefit.
I had a passing paralysis of paranoia. I'm not normally prone to paranoia about the CIA, but the topic is bulk surveillance, and the URL isn't exactly https://cia.gov/report/about-that-bulk-surveillance Its path is `.../63f697addbbd30a4d64432ff28bbc6d6/...pdf` Along with a half understood comment that sounded like "Relaaax everyone! No big deal. It was all about ISIL! Look at this liiiink."
The CIA will always want more power, that is the nature of the secret services but if the people are bothered, why isn't there more talk of curtailing what the President is allowed to do unilaterally?
If the president signs something illegal (unconstitutional in this case), why does nothing happen?
Impeachment is what exists to hold presidents accountable, and then voting is what holds the senate accountable, when they choose not to hold the president accountable.
I think the president can be prosecuted for criminal offenses though when they’re out of office, since what I said above would no longer apply.
I think we may be about to see the the end of the tradition of get out of jail free cards for former presidents, but I don't know what the long term consequences will be.
Why do they all do it? Might be a better question to ponder.
If a government allows its employees to get away with doing things which are against that government’s own rules for their own operation, then a few bad apples spoil the whole barrel.
If you need government spies secretly looking on certain citizens without the targets being aware of it via a warrant, make sure they can’t ever be used like Nixon. If you need government assassins, you definitely don’t want them used the way Nixon used government spies.
The Court has had the opportunity on multiple occasions to rule that this domestic spying is unconstitutional, and has declined to do so. Ergo, for all practical matters, it's legal.
Furthermore it appears that most of the US politicians have some sort of borderline-corrupt activity going on if not being actively involved in something illegal (Epstein springs to mind, various scandals that turn up around presidential elections). People in glass houses are cautious in their stone throwing.
And a final and decisive stroke - there is plausible uncertainty about whether the action is illegal. These are people who write the law, they are not expected to be stay-inside-the-legal-lines types because they all have different opinions on where the lines should be and are usually in the process of drawing them. They appoint the people who determine what the words mean and that leads to occasional creative reinterpretations. There isn't time to prosecute over every detail that someone objects to given the range of objections there are.
https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execu...
The problem is when you have a bureaucracy directed to "go collect intelligence" there is going to be a large grey area where there needs to be oversight, and there will always be people in a large org that need to be reigned in.
Anyway, the EO isn't the problem, it is the more boring challenge of oversight and managing large orgs.
Because the Presidents job is to distract from - and take the heat for - the crimes of the nation.
The nation has crimes it is keeping secret. These are national secrets, the revealing of which would harm the security of the nation.
Whether you think these national secrets being revealed would be a catastrophe, or indeed a badly needed justice for the inhumanities being committed in your name - it is the Presidents job to make sure the nation stays safe during the discussion.
Which is why CIA powers are not discussed until the weight of public opinion itself, threatens the 'security' of the secret-keepers/nation.
This is why impeachment exists. We impeached the last idiot-in-chief twice. Unfortunately, we get the Congress we deserve (ie, if we elect authoritarian-minded lackwits, we shouldn't be surprised when they refuse to convict).
Rather, this is what voting is for.
DOJ regulations pretty much prohibit bringing criminal charges against a sitting President.
Whether or not people think the impeachment process is a political sham is a different question/problem. Recently, it largely has been - both with Clinton and with Trump, for very different reasons. Even more so now with GOP members threatening to immediately impeach Biden (for what, I can't quite figure out) should they win back Congress.
Executive orders don't give Presidents unilateral power. They are subject to judicial review and cannot legally violate the Constitution, or exceed Presidential authority as defined in Article 2 of the Constitution, unless specific authority is granted by Congress. Also Congress can overturn a legislative order, either through legislation or simply denying funding. Although, when the legislative and judicial branches don't really want to stand up to the President for whatever reason, that's a moot point.
Also, there is always plenty of talk - from the party not currently in control of the White House. Executive orders are always tyranny when the other side writes them, and a necessary bulwark against tyranny when your side writes them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federa...
https://www.cia.gov/static/63f697addbbd30a4d64432ff28bbc6d6/...
The program is apparently bulk collection of financial data.
Wyden being pissed about it is a decent sign that it's something to be worried about though, he's spent a lot of time on this stuff.
This CIA program has no particular statutory authorization and is being justified under an executive order from the 80s. It wasn't disclosed to anyone in Congress. It isn't being even notionally overseen by the FISC. It's just a bunch of CIA people justifying their own procedures to themselves.
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/download/hainesburns_wydenheinr...
The former is likely database files, JSON, XML, etc. and anything that has a "common format", but I don't think specifics are given.
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All right, keep your secrets.
I would rank that coolness as way cooler than Kazakhstan but equally as cool as the Brazilian dictatorship? Still haven't got a chance to check out the CIA torture footage, but seeing as one of the people who ordered the torture and authorized the destruction of the tapes was put in charge and just left office a year ago, it turns out that discussion doesn't mean much.
edit: I guess it teaches us that we shouldn't expect more consideration from the current regime than the past one, seeing as they've not only gone entirely unpunished, but were rewarded. If we had never heard about the transgressions of the past, we wouldn't be fooled into expecting better out of the current crop.
edit: Am I the only one who read Brasil: Nunca Maís? Did the Church Committee change anything? It's actually reprehensible that we can talk about this stuff openly while parading the people who did it as experts on what we should do next.
edit:
"The CIA inspector general’s office has said it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cia-mistak...
That's the idea, and by and large the system functions as intended. Critically, it's a "must take increasingly burdensome measures to maintain classification" configuration. So default / inaction is declassification.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_th...
> That's the idea, and by and large the system functions as intended.
What makes you say it largely functions as intended? It sometimes functions, but that is different. Also, we don't know what we're missing.
In the US the people elect a government, the government passes laws creating rules (or passes laws delegating rule-making authority which is functionally the same thing) for, among other things, how information gets declassified. That information then gets declassified or not in accordance with those rules.
> we don't know what we're missing.
That is literally always true, it's impossible to prove that the government isn't hiding something.
Considering that voting rates are around 60%, eligibility rules are often a joke, and most of those votes are typically wiped out by FPP anyway, it's more like some people elect a government...
This said, the US declassification system is as good as it gets. Most countries on the planet don't have anything comparable, and anything deemed a state secret will forever remain as such in those countries (at least officially, bar revolutions). Not even Western Europe is particularly good in that regard. Somewhat ironically, and particularly on Cold War matters, us Europeans are often keeping secrets that would otherwise embarrass the US government, which wouldn't be possible if US agencies kept them on their books.
This program operated under an executive order forty years ago, before many HNers were born, likely. The guy who signed that order died many years ago. How is this coming to light now serving any public good? Guarantee the Patriot Act, for example, does not get repealed.
We also have no idea what hasn't been released, so it's impossible to say things are 'working', by design or otherwise.
The Patriot Act expired in 2020
He spoke out against it publicly and even threatened to veto should it make it through Congress.
It was him speaking out against it (and the abuses of it by intelligence agencies) that discouraged both Democrats and Republicans from pushing it through.
Trump didn't like the IAs and they didn't like him.
> The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. The stated object of the act was the "encouragement of learning," and it achieved this by securing authors the "sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending" the copies of their "maps, charts, and books" for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14-year term should the copyright holder still be alive.
So you not only need to know the existence of some secret document you are interested in (how could you?), they basically have the option to simply deny it’s existence?
Is it really how it supposed to work?
Otherwise, current classified programs could simply be confirmed by a brute force request of every possible program.
Prove me wrong.
I always wonder what would have happened if it had taken the Soviets longer to develop atomic weapons (or never did). Would a hawkish US president be more likely to use nuclear weapons to assert foreign policy than they are now?
And if they'd been normalized in a second war, even at tactical scale, it makes you wonder how the rest of nuclear history would have unfolded.
How about no.
Some idiot in a big country can do the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
- Iran
- Lebanon (ubstable)
- North Korea (they already have the tech even if they don't have proper ICBMs yet)
q.e.d?
"The Atomic Energy Commission is in a unique position in that it is perhaps the only permanent agency of the Government which has operational intelligence responsibilities comparable to that of the State, War, or Navy Departments. It is difficult at times to distinguish operational intelligence from actual operations and it is found that the Commission, without recognizing it as such, -----------------------------------------------------------------------"
Letters like this don’t signify anything cool unless they lead to meaningful action, and they usually do not. I wouldn’t be so quick to congratulate the system for such things. This is like having a fancy PnL dashboard that’s updated too late and nobody with power looks at it anyway.
They're supposed to enforce the laws equally against everyone, though, so the fact that certain powerful organizations in government are exempt and open about it is a little bit more terrifying than if they were exempt but quiet about it.
It's a bit of a flex.
There's literally a part of the US government that can torture people, get caught, get investigated by US Congress, hack into official congressional computers to delete evidence, get caught doing that, and then... face no consequences whatsoever.
If that isn't the most powerful organization in the world, I sincerely don't know who else might qualify for that title.
Not to quote a certain poet,[0] but you mug someone on the street and you could face life in prison, but if you mug a whole community, the worst that might happen is you lose your job
Obviously it's tricky. By delaying things people can mentally bias towards "that was then". It wasn't that long ago that the US government was kidnapping and forcibly drugging US citizens, but "that was then".
But it's also really important that at some point that information does make it out.
Just to be explicit, there is no reason to suspect that isn't still taking place right at this moment.
This will barely make the evening news and the Patriot Act will stand. Nothing will come of this.
The Patriot Act expired in 2020
That's part of the plan. Those WaPo articles carry a different tone if it's breaking news vs following up on a already broken story.
https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-repo...
From CNN (for what it’s worth) regarding Kennedy data:
“The vast majority of the almost 1,500 documents released by the National Archives as new appear to be duplicates of previously released documents with only a few redacted words now revealed…Some have no changes whatsoever.
The release still leaves more than 10,000 documents either partially redacted or withheld entirely”
The 9/11 data is in a similar situation. Much unreleased/classified data.
I never jest. And stop calling me Shirley.
One thing I’ve always wondered is why Snowden exposed the NSA mass surveillance, but didn’t say a word about the CIA despite having worked for both agencies. It is, of course, possible he didn’t know about the CIA collecting data, but I find that pretty hard to believe.
I think it's incredible that politicians haven't cracked down on three letter agencies ages ago. The threat to themselves seems like it should have been obvious. As long as they're sucking up data on US citizens (including presidents and congressmen) it would make it very very easy for those with that data to control anyone. When the NSA can lie to congress and face no consequences is it because the government if fine with that or because they are too afraid to do anything? It makes the highest offices of our government seem very weak and vulnerable. If they're terrified to do anything about them, what possible chance could the rest of us have?
His ability to accumulate power this way made him a major political target, which isn't quite the same as someone just trying to reel in the 3 letter agencies.
Well, they'll kill you.
That's a good reason to not go after them if you have a nice job as a politician.
It only goes to show that the "Deep State" is real. But, of course, because it came from the "wrong guys" the idea got ridiculed to the Moon and back, all while the people writing about it had colleagues or close family working for said "Deep State" institutions.
Sure -- this kind of "Deep State", the apolitical (or, if anything, authoritarian-right-leaning) one.
> But, of course, because it came from the "wrong guys" the idea got ridiculed to the Moon and back,
No, it got deservedly ridiculed because it claimed the existence of a left-leaning liberal "Deep State". Since fucking when is the military-industrial / spook-and-spy / government assassin community made up of leftie librul pinko commies?!? These are people who either don't give a shit about party politics, or if they care, tend to be right-wing hardliner God-and-country semi- (or full-on) Nazis.
> all while the people writing about it had colleagues or close family working for said "Deep State" institutions.
Sure... [Roll-eye emoji]
The leftie librul pinko commie writers (obviously rightly) denied the existence of the capital-D-Democratic leftie librul pinko commie "Deep State" that the right-wing hardliner God-and-country Nazi writers were gibbering about, and which you bought and are spouting forth here. (Wisen up and stop that shit, please. Thank you.)
The leftie librul pinko commie writers would probably be the first to admit the existence of the actually existing apolitical or right-wing hardliner God-and-country Nazi "Deep State", if that were ever up for debate, but ironically the right-wing hardliner God-and-country Nazi writers (and you?) would of course out-screech each other denying that.
We know Snowden took a LOT of documents related to spying on US citizens. I only remember seeing a few things that were released publicly. Is there still a lot more stuff he's going to release, or has released, just without much fanfare?
I'm genuinely curious because I remember people on both sides really freaked out about what he was going to release and I just haven't seen the supposed troves of information he was going to release.
Is it mainly just because its irrelevant so many years on now?
According to the The Snowden Archive[0] about 400 documents were published through publications out of a total 50,000 documents Snowden collected. As for the rest—First Look Media (parent company of The Intercept) shut down access to its archive, as well as the team set up to handle them, in 2019:
"First Look CEO Michael Bloom said that as other major news outlets had “ceased reporting on it years ago,” The Intercept had decided to “focus on other editorial priorities” after expending five years combing through the archive.[1]"
Very cool! Poitras and Greenwald apparently retain full copies, as well as the outlets that received them in the first place I'd assume.
As a last note I'll leave a medium post by Barrett Brown[2], an excellent reporter whose series of columns in the Intercept received the National Magazine Award—incidentally he burned it on a livestream in protest against First Look Media's decision to shut down their Snowden archive (got to see it live, the YouTube video is private now though unfortunately)
[0]: https://www.cjfe.org/snowden
[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-intercept-shuts-down-acces...
[2]: https://barrettbrown.medium.com/why-the-intercept-really-clo...
> Poitras and Greenwald
Yeah, back then they all used to be among the good guys. One thing I haven't quite understood, though: When and why, exactly, did they turn into raving loony pro-Putin mouthpieces? Or is the plural unfair; is it just Greenwald?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-i...
SAC had reconnaissance aircraft flying secret missions over the Soviet Union twenty-four hours a day. “If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.” Sprague was shocked. “But General,” he countered, “that’s not national policy.” Sprague remembered LeMay responding, “I don’t care. It’s my policy. That’s what I’m going to do.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/06/19/the-general-an...
I genuinely think we way-under-rate how closely we escaped nuclear annihilation in the last 100 years.
Now imagine how unrestrained they are when spying on the other 96% of the human population that resides on this planet, and that anything that Google, Apple (iCloud, iMessage), Facebook (WhatsApp, Instagram, including DMs), or Microsoft knows about you, they can know about you.
The CIA is truly out of control.
I tend to believe that EU’s privacy stance is primarily to do that. They are trying to forge a framework where free market can operate but keep the Europeans data in EU, under the EU jurisdiction.
Europe and US are allies but they are also competitors. It’s not wise to let foreign entities run you communications.
When the US fir the first time encountered that with TikTok, the first instinct was to ban it, I.e. the China way.
I like the EU way better.
As a mere undergraduate in the early '90s, reading about Omnivore (and later Carnivore and later Total Information Awareness and its subsequent refinements) and the ineffectual vituperations against them, I thought that the retrenchment was only apparent, a moving back to take yet another run at the dream of omniscient preemption and thereby control.
Today, nothing dies. Everything simply becomes more subtle. There is no single head to urge into the guillotine. Is there a way out, or be there no exit?
What's left to do? Knock over one's king man on the board? How's that for cynicism?
edit: for the down-voting Panglosians: give me your reason rather than mouse-clicks.
Is this you summing up how your entire comment evokes a Charlie Stross novel?
This kind of headline could mean anything from something benign to something which seriously threatens privacy.
Anyone who actually knows about this, what’s the TLDR?
https://www.cia.gov/static/63f697addbbd30a4d64432ff28bbc6d6/...