Call it Snowden 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Nine years after National Security Administration whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed that the United States was keeping a massive trove of information on its own citizens obtained via a secret digital dragnet, two Democrat senators are alleging the CIA has assembled a similar clandestine stockpile of our data.
According to The Hill, the late-Friday release of the reports is suddenly grabbing attention, if just because concerns over privacy have become widespread of late — targeting everyday Americans, as well as presidential candidates.
The reports were sent on the same day special counsel John Durham alleged in a court filing that lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign paid techs to “infiltrate” servers in both Trump Tower and the White House to intercept data on Donald Trump during the election and its aftermath.
According to the Associated Press, a heavily redacted letter was sent by Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.
They asked intelligence officials to detail a program which allegedly collected bulk data on American citizens in secret and 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 AP’s Nomaan Merchant noted.
Hellbound and Down 