CIA's Domestic Spying

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mada4 years agoHive.Blog5 min read

The CIA has recently been caught doing domestic spying, outside the parameter of regulations and oversight that are supposed to govern such things. But don't worry, one of their spying programs includes a pop-up box reminding analysts not to collect data on Americans without a foreign intelligence justification. From the Associated Press:

The CIA released a series of redacted recommendations about the program issued by an oversight panel known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. According to the document, a pop-up box warns CIA analysts using the program that seeking any information about U.S. citizens or others covered by privacy laws requires a foreign intelligence purpose. "However, analysts are not required to memorialize the justification for their queries," the board said.

Knowing that my civil liberties are being safeguarded by little more than a pop-up box is unsettling. Whenever I go to a website and see a pop-up box, I close it immediately because it just looks like trash on the screen. Maybe the CIA trains its agents to read pop-up boxes more carefully and consider their messages. I kind of hope that's not part of CIA training, but maybe it is.

This latest scandal isn't the first time the CIA has been caught messing around with domestic affairs. There was

, wherein the agency treated Americans like guinea pigs in all sorts of nasty experiments. There was Operation CHAOS, where the CIA went after civil rights and antiwar activists. And let's not forget the agency's involvement in arms and cocaine trafficking, coinciding with the emergence of the crack epidemic in major US cities. Gary Webb, an investigative journalist who reported on the latter, eventually committed 'suicide' by shooting himself in the head. Twice.

In a post-Snowden world, revelations of new government mass surveillance programs provoke only minor outrage. Today, the entire digital landscape has become a mass surveillance machine, vacuuming up our data for every conceivable purpose. Yes, the CIA is spying on Americans, but Facebook somehow knows to show me ads for nice camping stoves, and companies offering covid tests are also reselling customer medical data. Like it or not, all of our data belongs to the big companies and government agencies that make up our control regime.

In a sense, all of these data collection programs are moving us closer to a radically transparent future. Personally, I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. But if our lives are rendered transparent while the machinations of the control regime remain opaque, that's pretty bad. And if this regime is spying on us from the shadows while censoring true information in public discourse, that's worse than bad. It's pure dystopia.

When a recent Johns Hopkins study found that

, the study was censored by social media companies. This was just one of over

of Big Tech censoring public discourse about the pandemic. It's not clear how much of this censorship is being directed by government agencies behind the scenes. Maybe none. Maybe a great deal.

My guess is that the CIA spying program now coming to light is primarily focused on foreign threats with connections to American individuals and companies. This program is legally justified under Executive Order 12333, which was also used by the NSA to justify one of its warantless data collection programs. Note that data from the NSA program was used for domestic policing, while the origins of said data were hidden from criminal defendants and their attorneys behind a particular kind of lie called 'parallel construction.'

Is CIA data also being used for domestic policing? There is no way to know, but it seems more likely that this data is being used in some way to support the wave of US-sponsored coups in Africa, 8 of which have been

in recent years. The NSA already has generalized domestic mass surveillance locked down. I just assume that the CIA is more focused on replacing democratically-elected leaders with its militant puppets in parts of the world Americans rarely pay attention to.

(Feature image from Pixabay.)

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