America's Secret Police (Part 18)
Their secretive program for which we have very few details is operated within the legal chasm between FISA and The Electronic Communications Privacy Act and has zero judicial oversight because they are supposedly not “intercepting” communications which is the operational definition of electronic surveillance but acquiring business records containing telecommunications metadata either voluntarily disclosed by outside sources (i.e. outside the CIA) or are purchased from outside sources (e.g. data brokers). The only regulation possibly pertaining to their program is the confines of Executive Order 12333, which as I pointed out several years ago, Obama expanded to include “inadvertently” retrieving and sharing communications solely between U.S. persons that might contain evidence of a crime. The Vault 7 release on wikileaks reveals that the CIA have other tools for conducting electronic surveillance that fall outside the law such as using malware that leaves behind the fingerprints of foreign actors and they can remotely access any SMART device.
