Let’s step back from Ukraine for awhile and take up another issue that has lost in the media……
Remember when it was revealed that the NSA was collected mega data on US citizens?
There was endless rants and posts about the affront to our rights to privacy…..and yet the newest report of a massive data collection of US citizens is gone by with few writing of the outrage…..
The Central Intelligence Agency has been collecting American’s private data without any oversight or even the minimal legal safeguards that apply to the NSA and FBI, an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties.
According to a declassified report released yesterday by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), the CIA’s surveillance program is reminiscent of the mass surveillance programs conducted by the NSA, though the details released thus far paint a disturbing picture of potential wide-scale violations of people’s privacy. To start, the CIA program has apparently been conducted outside the statutory reforms and oversight of the intelligence community instituted after revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013. The newly declassified CIA data collection program is carried out in conjunction with Executive Order 12333 and is therefore subject to even less oversight than the woefully under-supervised NSA surveillance programs subject to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The whos, whats, whys, and hows of this semi-disclosed CIA program are still unknown, and the public deserves the right to know exactly what damage has been done. Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich are already pressing for the release of even more information. In a partially-redacted letter sent to the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director on April 13, 2021, the senators have called for the public release of the full report about the CIA’s surveillance, which remains classified. The senators’ letter also demands answers about how the agency collects the data, what data is being collected, and the rules governing its storage and retention.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/we-need-answers-about-cias-mass-surveillance
Once again the American people show a disturbing indifference to the world around them….as long as their little pathetic sphere is blue skies and unicorns then they could care damn less at the loss of rights.
Collectively the American people could be filed away in the ‘Can’t Fix Stupid’ collection.
Turn The Page!
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
In Saner Thought 
We have GCHQ routinely collecting data, and every time someone clicks ‘Accept cookies’ on a website, that exposes almost everything about their online lives. Ask ‘Alexa’ something, and that is marked down as something you are interested in, no matter how random it might be. Those devices can also ‘live record’ your normal conversations, as long as they are connected to the Internet. The younger generation seems to accept that, as a trade-off against the comparative ‘ease’ of online access in life. In another 100 years, nobody will even think about it, let alone mention it.
Best wishes, Pete.
Here as well….that is why I do not let such devices in my home…..these days people are too lax in their caring about their privacy….after being a radical for so long I am too paranoid and way cautious. chuq
I think it’s likely more an issue of priorities these days, chuq. True.. Americans have tended to not assign priorities of interest to issues that suggest governmental “toying” with a particular freedom or two on any normal day. After Hoover’s abuse of the FBI and Nixon’s dirty tricks everyone is suspicious these days. But trying to get the CIA to reveal their sources and methods of some suspected domestic data collection doesn’t compare all that well with the pandemic, the chaos of Trump world, the political divide, the social issues of BLM, reckless cops, etc., the economy.. and now Russia. Not saying it’s right or wrong.. it just is.
CIA operations of any kind has been banned from US soil…..but that was in the days before 9/11….and we know that natsec trumps (no pun intended) everything else these days. chuq