A senior Democratic lawmaker with knowledge of some of the US government’s most classified operations said he had “deep concerns” about certain activities of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The two-line letter, written by Senator Ron Wyden, the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, does not reveal the nature of the CIA’s activities or the senator’s specific concerns. But the letter follows a pattern in recent years of Wyden publicly suggesting wrongdoing or illegality in the federal government, sometimes referred to as the “Wyden Siren.”
In a statement (via the WSJ’s Dustin Volz), the CIA said it was “ironic but not surprising that Senator Wyden is unhappy” and called him a “badge of honor.”
When contacted by TechCrunch, a spokesperson for Wyden’s staff could not be reached for comment because the matter was confidential.
Tasked with overseeing the intelligence community, Wyden is one of the few lawmakers who can read highly classified information about ongoing government surveillance, including cyber and other intelligence operations. But because the programs are top secret, Wyden is not allowed to share details of what he knows with anyone else, including most other lawmakers, except for a handful of Senate staffers with security clearances.
As such, Wyden, a noted privacy hawk, has become one of the few key members of Congress whose rare but outspoken words on intelligence and surveillance matters are closely watched by civil liberties groups.
Over the past few years, Wyden has subtly sounded the alarm on several occasions in which he constructed a secret method of decision-making or intelligence-gathering as illegal or unconstitutional.
In 2011, Wyden said the US government relied on a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, which he said – without revealing the nature of his concerns – created “a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the US government secretly thinks the law says”.
Two years later, then-NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency relied on its secretive interpretation of the Patriot Act to force US phone companies, including Verizon, to continuously hand over the call records of hundreds of millions of Americans.
Since then, Wyden has sounded the alarm about how the US government collects the content of people’s communications; revealed that the Justice Department had barred Apple and Google from disclosing that federal authorities had secretly requested the content of their customers’ push notifications; and said the unclassified report, which CISA refused to release, contained “shocking details” about the national security threats facing US phone companies.
As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick noted, we may not yet know Wyden’s reason for blowing the whistle on CIA activities, but that every time Wyden has warned, he’s also been vindicated.