CIA gets new privacy constraints

Restrictions designed to restrict info on Americans

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama’s administration has imposed new privacy restrictions on the CIA that are designed to limit its use of information on Americans — changes that the agency made public just two days before President-elect Donald Trump is to take office.

CIA officials described the changes as a comprehensive update to guidelines that have been in place since the early 1980s, adapting those rules for an age when sensitive data about Americans is increasingly abundant online and vulnerable to being swept up by U.S. intelligence agencies.

One of the new provisions requires the CIA to purge certain types of information that it gathers overseas - including communications that might involve U.S. individuals - from its systems within five years. There was no previous restriction on how long the agency could keep such materials, officials said.

The revised guidelines were posted on the CIA’s website on Wednesday, the first time that the fundamental regulations governing the agency’s routine espionage operations were declassified and fully shared with the public.

“This is a very significant milestone for the agency,” said Caroline Krass, the CIA’s general counsel, who discussed the revisions in a briefing for reporters Wednesday. Krass said that the effort to update the guidelines had taken more than two years, and that the final documents were signed Tuesday by CIA Director John Brennan and Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

CIA officials acknowledged that the revisions were made without input from civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which have pushed for more aggressive measures to protect Americans’ privacy than are envisioned in the updated guidelines.

The Trump administration could override the revisions and impose its own rules, officials said. But doing so probably would be complicated by the Obama administration’s decision to move the espionage rules from the classified realm into the open.

Trump and key members of his national security team have said they are in favor of expanding U.S. intelligence authorities that were curtailed after the revelations of U.S. electronic surveillance by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor.