A senior Democrat familiar with some of the U.S. government's most secretive activities said he was “deeply concerned” about certain activities by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The two-line letter, written by Sen. Ron Wyden, the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, does not specify the nature of the CIA's activities or the senator's specific concerns. But the letter follows a pattern in recent years of Mr. Wyden publicly alluding to wrongdoing and misconduct within the federal government, also known as the “Wyden siren.”
In a statement (via WSJ's Dustin Volz), the CIA said it was “ironic but not surprising” that Sen. Wyden was unhappy, calling it a “medal of honor.”
When contacted by TechCrunch, a Wyden staff spokesperson was unable to comment because the matter is confidential.
Wyden, tasked with overseeing the intelligence community, is one of the few members of Congress allowed to see highly classified information about ongoing government surveillance, including cyber and other intelligence activities. But because the program is top secret, Mr. Wyden is prohibited from sharing details of what he knows with anyone else, including most other members of Congress, except for a small number of Senate staffers with security clearances.
That has made Mr. Wyden, known as a privacy hawk, one of the few major lawmakers whose infrequent outspokenness on intelligence and surveillance issues has come under scrutiny from civil liberties groups.
Over the past few years, Mr. Wyden has tacitly sounded the alarm on several occasions that he has interpreted secret rulings and intelligence-gathering methods as illegal or unconstitutional.
Wyden said in 2011 that the U.S. government relies on a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, which he said creates “a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the U.S. government secretly thinks the law says,” though he didn't specify what his concerns were.
Two years later, Edward Snowden, then an NSA contractor, revealed that the National Security Agency had relied on secret interpretations of the Patriot Act to force U.S. phone companies, including Verizon, to hand over the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans on an ongoing basis.
Since then, Wyden has sounded the alarm about how the U.S. government collects people's communications. The Justice Department has barred Apple and Google from disclosing that federal authorities secretly requested the content of their customers' push notifications. And he said the unclassified report, which CISA has refused to release, contains “shocking details” about the national security threats facing U.S. phone companies.
As Techdirt's Mike Masnick pointed out, we may never know why Wyden sounded the sirens about CIA activity, but each time he does, he's been proven right.