Today Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate Floor condemning the CIA's actions.
Here is her speech posted at Roll Call---I think her personal website isn't working (feinstein.senate.gov) especially since other Senators I tried work fine---though it could easily be my crappy computer....
Rolling Stone highlighted 11 shocking statements from her speech, including one of my favorites, her criticism of Haystack, which she defends when talking about need for NSA collecting metadata on everyone, regardless of suspicion and without a warrant, another problem she has with CIA spying on Congress (correctly, due to Separation of Powers) but sees as fine for American citizens and innocents in other countries.
When the Intelligence Committee launched a full-fledged investigation into what Senator Feinstein describes as the "the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed," the CIA unleashed documents as if it were trying to bury needles in a haystack.
The number of pages ran quickly to the thousands, tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and then into the millions. The documents that were provided came without any index, without organizational structure. It was a true "document dump" that our committee staff had to go through and make sense of. (emphasis NOT mine)
Several Statements from C-SPAN
and here is CIA Director John Brennan responding at CFR today
Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel always does great work on this, writing about the overlooked aspects of the story Robert Eatinger FOIA Double Standards
Today's (3/11/14) reports from McClatchy and NYT
Feinstein defends Senate
March 4, Did CIA spy on Senate?
Feinstein Publicly Accusses CIA of Spying
Senator Udall statement
Feinstein statement
March 6 FBI probing Senate removing documents from CIA
Those following closely the intelligence community, and especially since Snowden leaked NSA documents, have been criticizing Feinstein for her defending NSA actions.
When the Verizon order first came out, Feinstein said that this was the normal 215 order renewed every 3 months, and legal under Patriot Act authorized by Congress for several years (I think it was since 2006 or 2007)
Many senators who defended the NSA said that "if you don't do anything wrong you have nothing to fear since you have nothing to hide"
Obama and many others said that there is "Congressional, Judicial and Executive Branch Oversight"
Today Feinstein is making certain statements that fly in the face of her previous statements defending the NSA.
The Panetta review documents were no more highly classified than other information we had received for our investigation—in fact, the documents appeared to be based on the same information already provided to the committee.
What was unique and interesting about the internal documents was not their classification level, but rather their analysis and acknowledgement of significant CIA wrongdoing.
To be clear, the committee staff did not “hack” into CIA computers to obtain these documents as has been suggested in the press. The documents were identified using the search tool provided by the CIA to search the documents provided to the committee.
We have no way to determine who made the Internal Panetta Review documents available to the committee. Further, we don’t know whether the documents were provided intentionally by the CIA, unintentionally by the CIA, or intentionally by a whistle-blower.
Feinstein also mentioned
After a series of meetings, I learned that on two occasions, CIA personnel electronically removed committee access to CIA documents after providing them to the committee. This included roughly 870 documents or pages of documents that were removed in February 2010, and secondly roughly another 50 were removed in mid-May 2010.and that she has asked for an apology.
This was done without the knowledge or approval
With NSA, Feinstein and other defenders have said that
- it's all legal
- only metadata
- nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide
- there is congressional, judicial and executive branch oversight
So the hypocrisy when it is Her and her staff that is being spied on is laughable, even though this is a serious issue of constitutional protections and separation of powers, and she is right in this case.
I have said in the past that the "3 equal branches" made it easy to blame each other, as GOP in Congress blame Obama and Obama blames GOP in Congress.
Now it appears they spy on each other as well.
