by Glenn Greenwald at System Update via Locals
A once-secret, now-revealed report prepared for Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, details a remarkably invasive spying program aimed at American citizens. The report was prepared for Haines by a team of senior advisors in January, 2022, and was marked “secret” – making it a crime for anyone to discuss it – because its contents were never intended for public viewing. But Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), to his credit, badgered Haines for months until she finally released the report, and its admissions are genuinely stunning.
The crux of the report describes how the CIA, NSA and other U.S. security state agencies are purchasing enormous amounts of highly intrusive data about the activities of American citizens. This data is so personal, and enables such a comprehensive view into the private lives of Americans, that it would be unquestionably prohibited for these intelligence agencies to collect it on their own without first obtaining a “probable cause” search warrant. Yet by purchasing the data en masse – using the taxpayer dollars of the very citizens on whom they are spying – the U.S. intelligence community insists that it is merely acquiring “publicly available information” and thus has no barriers, legal or constitutional, on the dossiers they can compile, store, analyze and utilize on American citizens.
Yet the acknowledgements in this once-secret report – straight out of the mouths of the DNI’s senior advisors – make very clear how dangerous this so-called commercially available information (“CAI”) actually is when placed into the hands of the U.S. Security State (emphasis added):…
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