Late last night, Senators Ron Wyden (D‑OR) and Martin Heinrich (D‑NM) announced that they had pressured the CIA into releasing a previously (and still largely) classified Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) report about an Agency program targeting potential ISIS money sources with alleged or actual U.S. Person (USP) connections. The PCLOB report raises concerns, usually obliquely, about the potential privacy and civil liberties threat the CIA program represents to the financial records (and thus identities) of American citizens.
So what does the report tell us?
The report covers staff‐level discussions between PCLOB and CIA in 2015–2016. There is no evidence PCLOB staff had independent access to raw CIA data on the program in question, in contrast to Senate Intelligence Committee staff who worked on the mammoth Torture Report. The report provides no information on when the program began, who authorized it (Bush 43 or Obama), to what extent White House officials were aware of and/or briefed on the program, etc.
The PCLOB report is strictly about CIA’s acquisition, processing and dissemination of financial data, obtained from both open and classified sources, regarding potential USP-ISIS connections. While there are many alarming aspects about potential CIA intelligence activities designed to collect USP data under this program, a few stand out.
The CIA unit responsible for intake and data processing “runs the automated [redacted] algorithm that identifies records containing presumed USP identifying information [redacted sentence/paragraph].” (p. 45)
There is no evidence in the unredacted portions of the PCLOB report to indicate that the code underlying the algorithm in question was evaluated by PCLOB staff or any other non‐CIA entity to determine its validity, reliability, etc.
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