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 NEWS & UPDATES

PPSA Sues Six Intelligence Agencies to Produce Records: Have NSA, FBI, CIA Surveilled Members of Congress Who Oversee Them?

12/14/2020

 
PPSA Sues NSA, FBI, CIA - Intel
The Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability (PPSA) today filed suit against the Department of Justice and FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of State seeking records that would reveal if these agencies have been surveilling current and former Members of Congress with oversight responsibility of these agencies.
 
Almost fifty Members are named as being potentially surveilled in the lawsuit. They range across all political leanings, from House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff to former Rep. Trey Gowdy, from Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to Sen. Marco Rubio.
 
PPSA had filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with these six agencies as early as January 27, 2020. The law requires these agencies to give a timely and substantive response, either the prompt release of the requested documents, or an explanation of why these records are excluded from a FOIA request by statute.
 
“Their silence speaks volumes,” said Gene Schaerr, PPSA general counsel. “They clearly do not want to answer our requests.”
 
The FOIA request concerns two intelligence practices under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and its Section 702, which allows foreign surveillance but forbids spying on “U.S. persons” located inside the United States.
 
  • One such practice is “unmasking,” in which approximately twenty employees of the NSA and others in the CIA and FBI have the authority to internally reveal the identities of Americans caught up in the surveillance of foreign communications. Unmasking results in the naming of an American in intelligence summaries.
 
  • A related practice is “upstreaming.” This is the use of a person’s name as a search term in a database. Upstreaming can develop new raw intelligence. It is subject to the same “minimization” procedures as unmasking, meant to restrict the use of information about a U.S. person to a tight circle of recipients with a need to know.
 
  • In 2017, anonymous intelligence community sources confirmed that U.S. lawmakers’ names may frequently appear in executive branch intelligence reports. Lawmakers often don’t learn about such unmaskings unless they involve a hacking or security threat.
 
The secret FISA court released an opinion stating that in the 2016 election cycle some Americans had their names upstreamed, in violation of government policy. That opinion described the upstreaming of Americans as raising a “serious Fourth Amendment issue.”
 
The list of 48 current and former members of committees with intelligence oversight responsibility includes:
 
  1.       Rep. Adam Schiff
  2.       Rep. Jim Himes
  3.       Rep. Terri Sewell
  4.       Rep. Andre Carson
  5.       Rep. Jackie Speier
  6.       Rep. Mike Quigley
  7.       Rep. Eric Swalwell
  8.       Rep. Joaquin Castro
  9.       Rep. Denny Heck
  10.       Rep. Peter Welch
  11.       Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney
  12.       Rep. Val Demings
  13.       Rep. Raj Krishnamoorthi
  14.       Rep. Devin Nunes
  15.       Rep. Mike Conaway
  16.       Rep. Michael Turner
  17.       Rep. Brad Wenstrup
  18.       Rep. Chris Stewart
  19.       Rep. Rick Crawford
  20.       Rep. Elise Stefanik
  21.       Rep. Will Hurd
  22.       Rep. John Ratcliffe
  23.       Sen. James Risch
  24.       Sen. Marco Rubio
  25.       Sen. Susan Collins
  26.       Sen. Roy Blunt
  27.       Sen. Tom Cotton
  28.       Sen. John Cornyn
  29.       Sen. Ben Sasse
  30.       Sen. Dianne Feinstein
  31.       Sen. Ron Wyden
  32.       Sen. Martin Heinrich
  33.       Sen. Angus King
  34.       Sen. Kamala Harris
  35.       Sen. Michael Bennet
  36.       Sen. James Lankford
  37.       Sen. Mark Warner
  38.       Rep. Peter King
  39.       Former Rep. Frank LoBiondo
  40.       Former Rep. Trey Gowdy
  41.       Former Rep. Tom Rooney
  42.       Former Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
  43.       Former Rep. Jeff Miller
  44.       Former Rep. Lynn Westmoreland
  45.       Former Rep. Joe Heck
  46.       Former Rep. Mike Pompeo
  47.       Former Rep. Luis Gutierrez
  48.       Former Rep. Patrick Murphy

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