Yahoo News: New spying revelations prove once again Edward Snowden was right.
[1]https://news.yahoo.com/spying-revelations-prove-once-again-175342050.html

Your government is spying on you — again.
A [2]heavily redacted letter from Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (
D-N.M) revealed Thursday that the CIA has been doing some sort of bulk collectio
n of Americans' data. We don't really know the details — those parts are blacked
 out in the redactions, natch — but it was enough to alarm the senators, who bot
h sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "These documents reveal serious prob
lems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans," they said in a
 [3]joint statement.
This is an old problem, but one that was supposed to have been reined in. It's b
een nearly a decade since whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the National Sec
urity Agency had bulk collected records of Americans' [4]phone calls and [5]emai
ls. Federal courts later found the practice [6]was illegal, and Congress tighten
ed up the laws to [7]end the snooping. (Here's a good [8]Twitter thread detailin
g the state of the law.)
The CIA, however, literally plays by a different set of rules. The agency's prog
ram exists "entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the publi
c believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional
 or even executive branch oversight," Wyden and Heinrich wrote.
That's an obvious problem. Even if bulk collection is somehow justifiable — and
that's a [9]big "if" — it's dangerous in a democratic society to let an agency l
ike the CIA hoover up Americans' personal info without some form of outside scru
tiny. That power is easily abused, and indeed the data has been misused in the p
ast: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found in 2018 the FBI had [10]r
egularly used NSA information to check up on potential informants who weren't su
spected of criminal or national security violations. The FBI blamed the transgre
ssion on a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how the data could be legally used.
 Funny how that happens.

   Snowden, still living in exile after fleeing the United States when he
   turned whistleblower, had something to say about all of this. "You are
   about to witness an enormous political debate in which the spy agencies
   and their apologists on TV tell you this is normal and okay and the CIA
   doesn't know how many Americans are in the database or even how they
   got there anyway," he [11]tweeted on Thursday. "But it is not okay."

References

   1. https://news.yahoo.com/spying-revelations-prove-once-again-175342050.html
   2. https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HainesBurns_WydenHeinrich_13APR21 -FINAL.pdf
   3. https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-and-heinrich-newly-declassified-documents-reveal-previously-secret-cia-bulk-collection-problems-with-cia-handling-of-americans-information
   4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsas-bulk-collection-of-americans-phone-records-ends-sunday/2015/11/27/75dc62e2-9546-11e5-a2d6-f57908580b1f_story.html
   5. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-data-mining-authorised-obama
   6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/phone-records-surveillance-edward-snowden/2020/09/02/97f26498-ed67-11ea-99a1-71343d03bc29_story.html
   7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsas-bulk-collection-of-americans-phone-records-ends-sunday/2015/11/27/75dc62e2-9546-11e5-a2d6-f57908580b1f_story.html
   8. https://twitter.com/LizaGoitein/status/1492143903952318480
   9. https://www.wired.com/2017/03/mass-spying-isnt-just-intrusive-ineffective/
  10. https://theintercept.com/2019/10/10/fbi-nsa-mass-surveillance-abuse/
  11. https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1491967491303747584