The release last week of a partially declassified letter that Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) wrote last April to the director of national intelligence and director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recalls a prominent issue of a few years ago—national security agencies conducting broad collection of data that could cover activities of Americans and be considered an affront to their privacy. Wyden and Heinrich’s heavily redacted letter requests information on an otherwise unspecified “bulk program” of collection by the CIA. The more prominent issue from a few years ago centered on collection of telephone usage data by the National Security Agency (NSA), the primary organization responsible for collecting signals intelligence in support of U.S. national security.
