It’s time to rein in the limitless intelligence agencies
There is no right to privacy spelled out in the text of the
U.S. Constitution, but it may be time to start thinking about an amendment that puts one there.
This past week, the Wall Street
Journal reported on a newly declassified letter from two U.S. senators to the Central Intelligence Agency, urging the CIA to tell the public about a secret program that involved collecting data from an undisclosed source and pulling in records of Americans.
The April 2021 letter from
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, was released on Thursday. Although heavily redacted, the letter made clear that the senators thought it was “urgent” that the CIA declassify and make public information about the secret program, including what records the agency is collecting, the volume of records maintained, how often the agency was searching U.S. data, what relationship it has with its sources of intelligence, and the legal framework under which the program is operated.
A spokesperson for the CIA said the surveillance is authorized under the Reagan-era Executive Order 12333 and the attorney general’s guidelines, but the senators described the CIA program as “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection.”
Abuses of surveillance powers by the intelligence community are nothing new. In the 1970s, revelations of outrageous actions by the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies led to hearings on Capitol Hill, chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho. That led to the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. The law created the FISA court to review applications for secret warrants, part of the effort “to place intelligence activities within the constitutional scheme.”
But the FISA court process is no longer an effective safeguard against abuse. A series of reports by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz documented widespread problems with FBI requests for FISA warrants, including failure to comply with the so-called Woods Procedures, which were put in place to ensure that every fact in a FISA application is supported with documentation. Yet it appears that no one has been held accountable for these abuses. Even the former FBI attorney who pleaded guilty to altering an email, effectively fabricating a key fact used to ob
tain a warrant to spy on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, was spared serious consequences for his actions. Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced to a year of probation and 400 hours of community service. For the crime of submitting a falsified document to a U.S. agency, his law license was briefly suspended.
Oversight of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies has completely broken down.
The threat to freedom from secret surveillance and data collection reached a new level of danger this week with the release of a Department of Homeland Security “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” warning that the U.S. “remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors,
including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors.”
The bulletin is titled, “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland.” These government officials are labeling speech as terrorism.
Let me explain something. No.
Americans must push back on this creeping creepiness. Did you see what the IRS just tried to do?
The Internal Revenue Service had said that starting this summer, it would require Americans who wanted to go online to access their tax accounts or other IRS services to submit a “video selfie” to a private company called ID.me. The video and other personal data would then be used
William Burns testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on his nomination to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington.
to set up face-scanning to authenticate identity. Last summer, the Biden administration signed a twoyear, $86 million contract with ID.me to manage the security and facial recognition data of U.S. taxpayers.
Amid a storm of controversy, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig just announced that the
agency will “transition away” from the plan. However, the chief executive of ID.me told the Washington Post that its client list includes 10 federal agencies, among them the Social Security Administration, and 30 states, including California.
Hidden by secrecy, the government could use its various surveillance methods
and databases to monitor the communications, financial transactions and movements of any American, retaining records indefinitely, and regularly entering data on innocent Americans into law enforcement databases. The government could secretly flag Americans as suspected “conspirators” based on nothing other than their political views expressed online. Now that the Biden administration’s Homeland Security Department has used the word “terrorist” to describe people who make statements of “mis- disand mal-information,” we are a short step from having U.S. law enforcement agencies open investigations that destroy people’s lives for wrong-think.
Some would say we’re already there.
The people of the
United States, through their elected representatives in Congress and the state legislatures, have the power to amend the U.S. Constitution to guarantee a right of privacy. But that shouldn’t be necessary in order to stop abuses by the federal government’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment states plainly, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
We can protect our 21stcentury freedom by enforcing our 18th-century rights. And it’s time we started doing it.