Surprise! The Straight-Shooter Highly Patriotic Good Guy Organization the CIA Has Been Spying on Americans

Defund.

They'll say "We can't defend you against terrorists unless we can spy on you!"

And I say, honestly: "I don't care. You're a bigger threat than any terrorist. I'd rather a thousand Americans die from terrorist attacks than you fascist monsters have any power at all. There are many threats and we have to rationally rank them all in terms of menace, and you assholes have managed to put yourselves at the top of the list."

You're the dangerous ones. You're the ones with the schemes to enslave us.

Foreign terrorists can't enslave us. They can kill some of us, a bunch of us if they get very lucky, but they can't enslave us. They can't control us in our daily lives.

But you can.

And you want to.

The DOJ, FBI, and CIA are the Axis of Evil that most threatens the safety and liberty of the American people.

The CIA has a secret, undisclosed data repository that includes information collected about Americans, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee said. While neither the agency nor lawmakers would disclose specifics about the data, the senators alleged the CIA had long hidden details about the program from the public and Congress.

Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico sent a letter to top intelligence officials calling for more details about the program to be declassified. Large parts of the letter, which was sent in April 2021 and declassified Thursday, and documents released by the CIA were blacked out. Wyden and Heinrich said the program operated "outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection."

There have long been concerns about what information the intelligence community collects domestically, driven in part by previous violations of Americans' civil liberties. The CIA and National Security Agency have a foreign mission and are generally barred from investigating Americans or U.S. businesses. But the spy agencies' sprawling collection of foreign communications often snares Americans' messages and data incidentally.

Intelligence agencies are required to take steps to protect U.S. information, including redacting the names of any Americans from reports unless they are deemed relevant to an investigation. The process of removing redactions is known as "unmasking."

And we all know how you'd never unmask American citizens against the rules, don't we?

The CIA on Friday said the program highlighted by the senators and another disclosed this week are "repositories of information about the activities of foreign governments and foreign nationals." In a statement, the agency said the programs were classified to stop adversaries from compromising them.

And by "adversaries," they mean "American citizens and voters."

A little reminder:

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."

...

Clapper would later apologize in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, calling his response to Wyden "clearly erroneous."

He would later explain his perjury as an attempt to give "the least untruthful answer [he] could."

And of course he skated, because they're all literally above the law, and they know it, and they act like they know they're above the law.

posted by Ace at 04:50 PM

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