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REVEALED: The CIA and NSA Are Purchasing Sweeping Dossiers on U.S. Citizens which the Constitution Bars Them From Collecting on Their Own
Legal questions aside, why should the U.S. Security State be using the tax dollars of U.S. citizens to buy and maintain invasive data about their private lives?
June 15, 2023
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A once-secret, now-revealed report prepared for Biden's Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, details a remarkably invasive spying program aimed at American citizens. The report was prepared for Haines by a team of senior advisors in January, 2022, and was marked "secret" – making it a crime for anyone to discuss it – because its contents were never intended for public viewing. But Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), to his credit, badgered Haines for months until she finally released the report, and its admissions are genuinely stunning.

The crux of the report describes how the CIA, NSA and other U.S. security state agencies are purchasing enormous amounts of highly intrusive data about the activities of American citizens. This data is so personal, and enables such a comprehensive view into the private lives of Americans, that it would be unquestionably prohibited for these intelligence agencies to collect it on their own without first obtaining a "probable cause" search warrant. Yet by purchasing the data en masse – using the taxpayer dollars of the very citizens on whom they are spying – the U.S. intelligence community insists that it is merely acquiring "publicly available information" and thus has no barriers, legal or constitutional, on the dossiers they can compile, store, analyze and utilize on American citizens.

Yet the acknowledgements in this once-secret report – straight out of the mouths of the DNI's senior advisors – make very clear how dangerous this so-called commercially available information ("CAI") actually is when placed into the hands of the U.S. Security State (emphasis added):

CAI clearly provides intelligence value, whether considered in isolation and/or in combination with other information, and whether reviewed by humans and/or by machines. The IC [intelligence community] currently acquires a significant amount of CAI for mission-related purposes, including in some cases social media data [redacted] and many other types of information….

 

Without proper controls, CAI can be misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons. The widespread availability of CAI regarding the activities of large numbers of individuals is a relatively new, rapidly growing, and increasingly significant part of the information environment in which the IC must function….

 

The DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] currently provides funding to another agency that purchases commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones. The data DIA receives is global in scope and is not identified as “U.S. location data” or “foreign location data” by the vendor at the time it is provisioned to DIA….

 

CAI can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons. It can be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals. Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations. Mission creep can subject CAI collected for one purpose to other purposes that might raise risks beyond those originally calculated.  

Putting legalities and constitutional limits aside for the moment, what possible legitimate motive does the U.S. Government have for purchasing, collecting and storing sweeping dossiers about the private lives of American citizens? Why should the CIA and NSA be handed American tax dollars which it then uses to purchase information about where American citizens go, what they do, with whom they do it, with whom they speak – all without the slightest suspicion that those citizens have done anything wrong, let alone possessing "probable cause" to believe they are engaged in criminal activity or other wrongdoing?

The demand for basic privacy rights by the Founders is evident in multiple amendments in the Bill of Rights. By itself, the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," and the additional protection that "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," demonstrates how contrary this program is to core constitutional values.

Over and over, this once-secret report emphasizes how dangerous this information is in the hands of the U.S. Government, and how many different ways this data could be used to destroy citizens' lives:

CAI can contain information that is deemed sensitive, meaning information that is not widely known about an individual that could be used to cause harm to the person’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety….

 

Studies document the extent to which large collections of sensitive and intimate information about individuals, CAI or not, can be subject to abuse. Documented examples of LOVEINT abuses (government officials spying on actual or potential romantic partners) involving other intelligence collections demonstrate the potential for comparable abuse of CAI held by the IC. 

 

In the wrong hands, sensitive insights gained through CAI could facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming.

 

“This report reveals what we feared most,” said Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress, to WIRED about this new report. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.” 

On our SYSTEM UPDATE program on Tuesday night, we examined and dissected each of the key parts about this report (you can watch that episode at the link below). What is particularly striking is that just last week, we commemorated on that program the 10-year anniversary of the start of the Snowden reporting (the first article ever published from the archive was my June 6, 2013 report in The Guardian revealing that the NSA was collecting enormous databases about the communications activities of American citizens, something that Obama's senior national security official, James Clapper, had just months earlier falsely denied to the Senate was being done). 

To do so, I spoke with both Edward Snowden and Laura Poitras, the Oscar-winning director of CitizenFour, about what has changed since the world learned that the NSA had secretly converted the internet into a weapon of mass suspicionless surveillance, only to now discover that the NSA, CIA and other agencies are circumventing whatever minimal legal and constitutional limits they have by purchasing this data for their own use. 

On Tuesday night, I devoted the full hour to this newly revealed domestic spying program, taking viewers step by step through this report. You can, and I hope will, watch it at the link below. That program places this new domestic snooping into its historical context, whereby fear-mongering has been used by these security agencies since the internet first emerged under the Clinton administration, all with the goal of ensuring that no American has any privacy in the digital era. And, most importantly, we examined the legal and constitutional limits that are being ignored and violated by this program whereby the U.S. Government brazenly uses Americans' own money to spy on them in ways that would otherwise, as they admit, be legally barred.


On Monday night, we aired a one-hour interview with Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (you can watch it at the link below). It was one of the most interesting interviews I have conducted with a major political figure - and RFK is clearly that: he is polling consistently at 20% against Joe Biden, while Marianne Williamson receives another 8-10%. We discussed a broad range of issues: COVID,  the war in Ukraine,  China,  and the ways in which propaganda functions and how he has been manipulated by it. On our live after-show that we broadcast exclusively for subscribers (meaning subscribers to our Substack page who have transferred their subscription for free to Locals, which you can do here), I shared some thoughts about that interview and RFK's candidacy.


The Tuesday night episode of SYSTEM UPDATE that we devoted to this report is here: here.

Our Monday night interview of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can be watched here: here.

And our commemoration of the ten-year anniversary of the start of the Snowden reporting, with Edward Snowden and Laura Poitras, can be seen here: here.

 

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The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Curt Mills on the Trump Administration's Foreign Policy, Israel, and Iran; Plus: Glenn Takes Your Questions
System Update #456

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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President Trump's 3-country trip to the Persian Gulf States this week, as well as a foreign policy address he delivered while in Saudi Arabia, has many people believing that the President laid out a radically new foreign policy vision that sharply departs from the bipartisan dogma of the last 60 years. And it's not just his words, but his actions that have many people believing this: from Ukraine and Iran to Syria and Israel. How real is this new foreign policy vision, how new and how concrete is it? 

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Every Friday night, we have a Q&A session where we take questions from our Locals members and do our best to answer as many as we can. As is usually the case, the quality of the questions is quite high and the range is far-reaching, so we look forward to doing our best to discuss the questions raised by our members. 

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Curt Mills is the Executive Director of The American Conservative and has long been one of the most informative voices on foreign policy, especially the paleoconservative version of it, the non-interventionist version of that. Just as a side note, the American Conservative happens to be the first magazine ever to pay me to publish an article. That was back in 2005, maybe 2006, right when I was just starting. They asked me to write about the dangers of the Bush-Cheney assault in the name of the War on Terror. I ended up writing several other articles for them over the next few years against the War on Terror and the wars that it entailed. So, there's been a lot of alignment between me and that magazine, not fully, but a lot of alignment because they come from this part of the Republican Party, that I do happen to have a lot in common with, and we're very excited to have Curt with us. He's a really interesting thinker who ponders these questions quite a bit. And so, we have a lot to talk to him about tonight. 

G. Greenwald: Curt, good evening. Welcome to the show. It's great to see you. 

Curt Mills: Good evening. Thanks. It's an honor. 

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Rebrand of Syria's al-Jolani: Does the Term "Terrorist" Mean Anything?  "Free Market" Governors Ban Lab-Grown Meats to Protect Meat Industry: With Reason Journalist Emma Camp
System Update #455

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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 The "interim" President of Syria was known until about five months ago by his terrorist’s name, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, but now he has undergone a major western transformation by which he traded his military, tunic and pants combo for Armani suits and ties. He has even been given a new, less threatening name: Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, President of Syria. As recently as December, the Justice Department on its site branded him a wanted al-Qaeda terrorist and offered a $5 million reward for any information leading to his capture. I know where he is, he's right there, he's ruling over Syria and Damascus. 

What a difference a few months make. This monstrous al-Qaeda terrorist is now a respected world leader because the U.S., Israel and the EU countries decided, for whatever reasons, that they want him to rule Syria. 

President Trump met with Jolani, or the Syrian President, on Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he shook his hand, posed for pictures, and then gushed about how handsome and tough he is. All that was preceded by a state visit to France, where President Macron welcomed him by standing in front of the storied presidential palace in Paris, as al-Jolani pulled up in his black chauffeured car. 

Remember, we fought a 20-year war against al-Qaeda. 

How can someone almost literally overnight go from a wanted al-Qaeda terrorist monster to someone the West unifies to embrace as a world leader? All of this leads to many important questions, starting with: does this very term "terrorist" have any real or fixed meaning at all? Or is it just a propaganda term that gets applied arbitrarily? 

In our second segment, Emma Camp, associate editor of Reason Magazine, joins us to discuss the ban announced by Greg Monforte, the governor of Montana, on lab-grown meat. She has written extensively about this topic. It's just a very strange thing to watch the state ban people from wanting to consume food that has been approved and that they want to eat. You don't have to like lab-grown meat; the solution is just don't buy it and don't consume it, but don't try to ban other people who want to. 

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So, there is this very strange phenomenon that I've actually been talking about and writing about for a long time, which is how malleable and empty this term terrorism seems to be in terms of the way it's applied. It's an extremely central term. In fact, we fought a war for 20 years after 9/11 in multiple different countries in the name of stopping terrorism. 

We constantly kill people or imprison them based on accusations that they're terrorists. Yet, there's that old saying that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. So often, we take people whom we don't like, and we call them terrorists. Then, when we decide that they're actually of use to us and we say, “Oh, that term doesn't apply anymore.” That leads to the question of the origin of this term. Where did it come from? Doesn’t it actually mean anything? 

In The New York Times, on May 14, which was yesterday, there was an article with an interesting headline. It says: “Trump Meets Former Militant Who Now Leads Syria” 

That word, militant, is a very nice word. It's very benign. One can be militant about anything. I can be a militant wanting to cure cancer, I can be a militant wanting to feed children. Doesn't really scare anyone. 

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