This has be ‘revealed’ by Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico ….
Anyone who follows this tuff isn’t the least bit surprised…
The National Security Agency acts as the ‘ears’ for the Central Intelligence Agency to listen for any foreign information that might indicate something harmful coming at America…
They do that thru massive data surveillance…
And they have working relationships with the British and other intelligence sharing partners….
The intelligence agencies are generally barred from domestic listening , but one would think THAT is impossible…Once they get the trail of something suspicious?…They are going to follow up…The info goes to the FBI to handle in this country…
The senator’s will follow up on looking for ‘transparency’…
But the ‘government’ will continue to listen in…..
Both senators have long pushed for more transparency from the intelligence agencies. Nearly a decade ago, a question Wyden posed to the nation’s spy chief presaged critical revelations about the NSA’s mass-surveillance programs.
In 2013, Wyden asked then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper if the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper initially responded, “No.” He later said, “Not wittingly.”
Former systems administrator Edward Snowden later that year revealed the NSA’s access to bulk data through U.S. internet companies and hundreds of millions of call records from telecommunications providers. Those revelations sparked worldwide controversy and new legislation in Congress….
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Intelligence agencies are subject to guidelines on the handling and destruction of Americans’ data. Those guidelines and laws governing intelligence activity have evolved over time in response to previous revelations about domestic spying.
The FBI spied on the U.S. civil rights movement and secretly recorded the conversations of Dr. Martin Luther King. The CIA, in what was called Operation Chaos, investigated whether the movement opposing the Vietnam War had links to foreign countries.
“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, said in a statement. “The CIA conducts these sweeping surveillance activities without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress.”….