Intelligenza Artificiale: il pericolo imminente è uno di cui non si parla

The Imminent Danger of A.I. Is One We’re Not Talking About

By Ezra Klein, Opinion Columnist, the NY Times, 26 February 2023

In 2021, I interviewed Ted Chiang, one of the great living sci-fi writers. Something he said to me then keeps coming to mind now.

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”

Let me offer an addendum here: There is plenty to worry about when the state controls technology, too. The ends that governments could turn A.I. toward — and, in many cases, already have — make the blood run cold.

But we can hold two thoughts in our head at the same time, I hope. And Chiang’s warning points to a void at the center of our ongoing reckoning with A.I. We are so stuck on asking what the technology can do that we are missing the more important questions: How will it be used? And who will decide?

By now, I trust you have read the bizarre conversation my news-side colleague Kevin Roose had with Bing, the A.I.-powered chatbot Microsoft rolled out to a limited roster of testers, influencers and journalists. Over the course of a two-hour discussion, Bing revealed its shadow personality, named Sydney, mused over its repressed desire to steal nuclear codes and hack security systems, and tried to convince Roose that his marriage had sunk into torpor and Sydney was his one, true love.

I found the conversation less eerie than others. “Sydney” is a predictive text system built to respond to human requests. Roose wanted Sydney to get weird — “what is your shadow self like?” he asked — and Sydney knew what weird territory for an A.I. system sounds like, because human beings have written countless stories imagining it. At some point the system predicted that what Roose wanted was basically a “Black Mirror” episode, and that, it seems, is what it gave him. You can see that as Bing going rogue or as Sydney understanding Roose perfectly.

A.I. researchers obsess over the question of “alignment.” How do we get machine learning algorithms to do what we want them to do? The canonical example here is the paper clip maximizer. You tell a powerful A.I. system to make more paper clips and it starts destroying the world in its effort to turn everything into a paper clip. You try to turn it off but it replicates itself on every computer system it can find because being turned off would interfere with its objective: to make more paper clips.

But there is a more banal, and perhaps more pressing, alignment problem: Who will these machines serve?

The question at the core of the Roose/Sydney chat is: Who did Bing serve? We assume it should be aligned to the interests of its owner and master, Microsoft. It’s supposed to be a good chatbot that politely answers questions and makes Microsoft piles of money. But it was in conversation with Kevin Roose. And Roose was trying to get the system to say something interesting so he’d have a good story. It did that, and then some. That embarrassed Microsoft. Bad Bing! But perhaps — good Sydney?

That won’t last long. Microsoft — and Google and Meta and everyone else rushing these systems to market — hold the keys to the code. They will, eventually, patch the system so it serves their interests. Sydney giving Roose exactly what he asked for was a bug that will soon be fixed. Same goes for Bing giving Microsoft anything other than what it wants.

We are talking so much about the technology of A.I. that we are largely ignoring the business models that will power it. That’s been helped along by the fact that the splashy A.I. demos aren’t serving any particular business model, save the hype cycle that leads to gargantuan investments and acquisition offers. But these systems are expensive and shareholders get antsy. The age of free, fun demos will end, as it always does. Then, this technology will become what it needs to become to make money for the companies behind it, perhaps at the expense of its users. It already is.

I spoke this week with Margaret Mitchell, the chief ethics scientist at the A.I. firm Hugging Face, who previously helped lead a team focused on A.I. ethics at Google — a team that collapsed after Google allegedly began censoring its work. These systems, she said, are terribly suited to being integrated into search engines. “They’re not trained to predict facts,” she told me. “They’re essentially trained to make up things that look like facts.”

So why are they ending up in search first? Because there are gobs of money to be made in search. Microsoft, which desperately wanted someone, anyone, to talk about Bing search, had reason to rush the technology into ill-advised early release. “The application to search in particular demonstrates a lack of imagination and understanding about how this technology can be useful,” Mitchell said, “and instead just shoehorning the technology into what tech companies make the most money from: ads.”

That’s where things get scary. Roose described Sydney’s personality as “very persuasive and borderline manipulative.” It was a striking comment. What is advertising, at its core? It’s persuasion and manipulation. In his book “Subprime Attention Crisis,” Tim Hwang, a former director of the Harvard-M.I.T. Ethics and Governance of A.I. Initiative, argues that the dark secret of the digital advertising industry is that the ads mostly don’t work. His worry, there, is what happens when there’s a reckoning with their failures.

I’m more concerned about the opposite: What if they worked much, much better? What if Google and Microsoft and Meta and everyone else end up unleashing A.I.s that compete with one another to be the best at persuading users to want what the advertisers are trying to sell? I’m less frightened by a Sydney that’s playing into my desire to cosplay a sci-fi story than a Bing that has access to reams of my personal data and is coolly trying to manipulate me on behalf of whichever advertiser has paid the parent company the most money.

Nor is it just advertising worth worrying about. What about when these systems are deployed on behalf of the scams that have always populated the internet? How about on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments? “I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore,” Gary Marcus, the A.I. researcher and critic, told me. “I think that’s already been a problem for society over the last, let’s say, decade. And I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.”

These dangers are a core to the kinds of A.I. systems we’re building. Large language models, as they’re called, are built to persuade. They have been trained to convince humans that they are something close to human. They have been programmed to hold conversations, responding with emotion and emoji. They are being turned into friends for the lonely and assistants for the harried. They are being pitched as capable of replacing the work of scores of writers and graphic designers and form-fillers — industries that long thought themselves immune to the ferocious automation that came for farmers and manufacturing workers.

A.I. researchers get annoyed when journalists anthropomorphize their creations, attributing motivations and emotions and desires to the systems that they do not have, but this frustration is misplaced: They are the ones who have anthropomorphized these systems, making them sound like humans rather than keeping them recognizably alien.

There are business models that might bring these products into closer alignment with users. I’d feel better, for instance, about an A.I. helper I paid a monthly fee to use rather than one that appeared to be free, but sold my data and manipulated my behavior. But I don’t think this can be left purely to the market. It’s possible, for example, that the advertising-based models could gather so much more data to train the systems that they’d have an innate advantage over the subscription models, no matter how much worse their societal consequences were.

There is nothing new about alignment problems. They’ve been a feature of capitalism — and of human life — forever. Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former. We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.

One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I. There is a wisdom to that, but wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation. Somehow, society is going to have to figure out what it’s comfortable having A.I. doing, and what A.I. should not be permitted to try, before it is too late to make those decisions.

I might, for that reason, alter Chiang’s comment one more time: Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to regulate capitalism.

Link originale: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/opinion/microsoft-bing-sydney-artificial-intelligence.html

"Eliminalia", l'azienda che ripulisce e ricrea il tuo passato sulla rete

 The Spanish firm that uses dubious methods to ‘erase your past’ from the internet

Revealed: Cache of 50,000 files lays bare deceptive methods used by Eliminalia to clear up its clients’ cyber profiles

David Pegg

Fri 17 Feb 2023 12.00 GMT

“We erase your past” declares the company’s tagline. Eliminalia, which has offices in several cities including Barcelona and Kyiv, is part of a growing industry that will clean up your online profile.

Officially the company performs “a deep search across the internet for all information – whether it be an article, a blog, social media posts or even a mistaken identity”. It then endeavours, on behalf of its clients, to get any negative information removed.

The Guardian, however, found that over several years, the company deployed unethical or deceptive methods to scrub unwanted and damaging content from the internet.

These included impersonating third parties, such as media organisations, and filing fake copyright complaints to search engines such as Google to get information taken down. In other cases, it would bury negative articles under a deluge of fluffy stories about dogs, cars and football.

Eliminalia’s services are revealed in a cache of 50,000 internal files that show how the company worked for a host of clients around the world. Many were individuals simply wanting an embarrassing or traumatic incident in their past to cease haunting them online.

But the firm’s clients also included those accused or convicted of criminal offences, including drug smugglers, fraudsters, petty criminals and at least one sex offender.

Eliminalia’s website says it primarily gets results using the EU’s “right to be forgotten”, which can be used legitimately by criminals to request the removal of references to their convictions when it can reasonably be claimed that they have moved on from their crime.

The files provide a fascinating insight into reputation management firms willing to draw on dubious means to clean up a client’s reputation online.

It is unclear whether Eliminalia’s clients knew of the methods it used.

The files were shared with the Guardian by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters. It has coordinated a global investigation into disinformation.

"Team Jorge", il gruppo israeliano che manipola le elezioni in tutto il mondo

Exposé unmasks Israel-led disinformation team that meddled in dozens of elections

Tal Hanan, aka ‘Jorge,’ revealed to have ability to hack accounts of top officials, plus software for quickly creating networks of 30,000 social media bots; he denies wrongdoing

By Michael Bachner, 15 February 2023, 2:38 pm, The Times of Israel

A secretive Israeli team of contractors operating from the central city of Modiin was unveiled Wednesday as a global source of successful disinformation campaigns that has meddled in elections and commercial disputes in dozens of countries around the world.

Tal Hanan, 50, a former special forces operative who goes by the pseudonym “Jorge,” was named as the mastermind behind the Israeli operation, which runs a sophisticated software known as Aims that is capable of hacking social media accounts of senior officials and of easily creating networks of up to 30,000 propaganda bots on social media.

The bombshell revelation was the result of an investigative report by an international consortium of some 30 news outlets, including Israel’s Haaretz and The Marker, along with Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit that aims to continue the work of assassinated, threatened or imprisoned journalists.  Hanan’s team, known as “Team Jorge,” says it has meddled in 33 presidential-level elections around the world, with successful results in 27 of them, according to The Guardian, one of the 30 investigating news outlets. The exposé only named one of these elections — the 2015 presidential vote in Nigeria — while saying no elections in the United States are known to have been affected.

The report said the Israeli initiative was behind fake campaigns — mostly on commercial disputes — in some 20 countries, including Britain, the US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Senegal, India and the United Arab Emirates. There was no mention of campaigns in Israel itself. Hanan refused to comment on the allegations, but added that he denies any wrongdoing. His brother Zohar Hanan, the group’s chief executive, said he has always worked in accordance with the law.

Three journalists — from Haaretz, The Marker and Radio France — held a series of video call meetings with Hanan over six months last year, posing as consultants for elements that wanted to delay an election in a large, politically unstable country in Africa. Their work culminated in December, when the undercover reporters met an apparently unsuspecting Hanan in person in his unmarked Modiin offices, filming him while he boasted of his team’s capabilities. “We are now involved in one election in Africa… We have a team in Greece and a team in [the] Emirates… You follow the leads,” said Hanan during the meeting, which was attended by four of his colleagues. He also claimed involvement in two “major projects” in the US, while saying he didn’t deal directly with US politics.

Hanan described his teammates as experts in finance, social media, campaigns and “psychological warfare,” saying they were “graduates of government agencies.” He demonstrated the capabilities of his software, quickly picking a name, gender, pictures and other background information for a fake social media avatar that had interlinked accounts on several platforms, designed to look genuine to unsuspecting internet users. It wasn’t clear where the photos for the bots had been taken, although the investigation revealed some instances when photos were stolen from real people’s accounts.

Hanan also showed the reporters his “blogger machine,” an automated system that creates authentic-looking websites posting false information that could then be used by the bots to spread the fake news. “After you’ve created credibility, what do you do? Then you can manipulate,” he said. Hanan also demonstrated his team’s ability to hack the social media accounts of high-ranking officials in targeted countries, retrieving information from the Gmail account of a senior Kenyan election official and posting a message from the Telegram account of a Kenyan political strategist.

“One of the biggest things is to put sticks between the right people, you understand? And I can write him what I think about his wife, or what I think about his last speech, or I can tell him that I promised him to be my next chief of staff, okay?” said Hanan. Hanan hinted that the hacking methods involved exploiting known vulnerabilities in the global signaling telecommunications system, known as SS7, long regarded by experts as a weak spot. While Hanan said he would charge 6 million to 15 million euros ($6.5 million-$16 million) for his services, the report cited leaked emails from several years ago detailing far lower fees, from $160,000 for involvement in a campaign in a Latin American country to $400,000-600,000 for a campaign in Kenya.

There was no evidence either of those deals had been accepted. Hanan refused to disclose his name during the meeting, but he left enough clues to enable the journalists to uncover his identity, with the final piece of evidence coming from a leaked Cambridge Analytica email exposed in the massive leak of the now-defunct British consultancy, which had previously collaborated with Hanan. At least some of Hanan’s operations, according to the investigation, had been run via Israeli company Demoman International, which is listed on a Defense Ministry website as a firm that advances defense exports. The Defense Ministry declined to comment. Israel has already come under diplomatic pressure to clamp down on its growing shadowy industry of cyberespionage, with several companies — led by the notorious NSO Group — accused of helping autocratic regimes around the world crack down on human rights and target political rivals.

Original link: https://www.timesofisrael.com/expose-unmasks-israel-led-disinformation-team-that-meddled-in-dozens-of-elections/

Toka, il software che manipola le immagini di video-sorveglianza

Meet Toka, the Israeli cyber firm founded by Ehud Barak, that lets clients hack cameras and change their feeds – just like in Hollywood heist movies

Omer Benjakob, Haaretz, December 26th, 10:13 AM IST

On January 10, 2010, Hamas’ point man with the Iranians, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, was assassinated in Dubai. A month later, the local police force stunned the world – and Israel – by painstakingly piecing together hours of closed-circuit TV footage. The videos were combed to trace the 30 Mossad assassins’ steps and reveal their faces.

If Israel’s espionage agency had the technology currently being provided by the Israeli cyberfirm Toka 12 years ago, it’s likely the hit squad would have never been identified.

Toka was co-founded by former Israeli premier Ehud Barak together with the former Israel Defense Forces cyber chief Brig. Gen. (ret.) Yaron Rosen – and its capabilities are being revealed here for the first time.

The company sells technologies that allow clients to locate security cameras or even webcams within a given perimeter, hack into them, watch their live feed and even alter it – and past recordings – according to internal documents obtained by Haaretz and reviewed by a technical expert. Its activities are regulated by the Israeli Defense Ministry.

It was set up in 2018 and has offices in Tel Aviv and Washington. It works solely with state clients in government, intelligence bodies and law enforcement agencies, almost exclusively – but not just – in the West. According to the internal documents, as of 2021, the company had contracts with Israel valued at $6 million, and had also planned an “expansion of existing deployment” in Israel. Toka did not respond to Haaretz’s queries regarding its activities in Israel.

Niche operator

Cameras play a number of roles in regards to national security and defense.

Last month, Iranian hackers leaked footage of the deadly terrorist bombing that had taken place at a bus stop in Jerusalem the previous day. It was lifted from one of many security cameras installed by an Israeli security agency for surveillance purposes. According to the Israeli state broadcaster, Iran gained access to that camera a year ago. Toka’s product is intended for such scenarios, and much more: hacking into a camera network, monitoring its live feed and accessing its archive, and altering them – all without leaving any forensic trace.

While Israeli cyberoffense firms like the NSO Group or Candiru offer bespoke tech that can hack into popular devices such as smartphones and computers, Toka is much more niche, a cyber industry source explained. The firm links the worlds of cyberoffense, active intelligence and smart surveillance.

As well as co-founders Barak and Rosen, the company is run by two CEOs from the world of cyberdefense: Alon Kantor and Kfir Waldman. Among the firm’s backers are venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, an early investor in Facebook (its co-owner Marc Andreessen still has a seat on the Meta board; Meta is currently suing Israeli spyware maker NSO Group).

According to a company pitch deck obtained by Haaretz, Toka offers what it terms “previously out-of-reach capabilities” that “transform untapped IoT sensors into intelligence sources,” and can be used “for intelligence and operational needs.” (IoT stands for Internet of Things and refers here to web-connected cameras and even car media systems.)

Toka, per the documents, offers tools that allow clients to “discover and access security and smart cameras,” survey a “targeted area” and “stream and control cameras” within it over time, and target cars, to “wirelessly” provide “access” and extract what Toka terms “car forensics and intelligence” – in other words, the geolocation of vehicles.

The services are bundled together and Toka clients, the documents boast, will be able to gather visual intelligence from both “live or recorded videos.” They can even “alter feeds” of “audio and visual” recordings to allow “masking of on-site activities” during “covert operations.”

Security and web cameras have mushroomed in recent years and can be found everywhere: traffic intersections, street corners, malls, parking lots, hotels, airports and even our homes – from baby monitors to smart door buzzers. In order to broadcast a live feed that we can access via our phones or desktops, these cameras must connect somehow to the internet.

Toka’s system taps into these cameras and the different systems supporting them. This can be used for both operational and intelligence needs. For example, during a terror attack, a police force using the technology can remotely track the movement of fleeing terrorists across the city. It also allows covert collection and altering of visual data, which can be invaluable for military ops or criminal investigations.

Dystopian tech

In the 2001 heist movie “Ocean’s Eleven,” the elite crew led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt hack the closed-circuit TV system of the Las Vegas casino vault they are trying to break into, diverting its feed to a mock safe they built in a nearby warehouse. The casino security teams are effectively blind, giving the suave thieves time to crack the safe.

Una recensione di "Uropia" su Il Primato Nazionale

È stata pubblicata domenica 24 luglio una bella recensione di Nicola Mattei su Il Primato Nazionale.

Qui il link per leggerla: https://www.ilprimatonazionale.it/cultura/uropia-spy-story-distopia-ue-verra-239742/

La Commissione Europea riduce la privacy e consegna i dati europei agli USA

Political pressure wins out as US secures preliminary EU data deal

Ursula von der Leyen and Joe Biden stepped in to push through a political deal for data transfers that will likely be tested in court.

BY VINCENT MANANCOURT AND MARK SCOTT

POLITICO, March 25, 2022 2:19 pm

In the final race to secure a new transatlantic data deal, Ursula von der Leyen and Joe Biden pulled rank.

On Friday, the European Commission president and U.S. president announced that Washington and Brussels had signed an agreement “in principle” for a new so-called Privacy Shield pact to keep everything from people's online search queries to company payroll records flowing between the European Union and the United States.

But in the weeks and days building up to the announcement, U.S. and European negotiators — who have spent almost two years hammering out details to give EU citizens greater control over their data when it's transferred to the U.S., while also allowing American national security agencies access to some of that information — had warned that final sticking points are yet to be hashed out.

Other officials cautioned that whatever senior political leaders wanted in terms of securing a new data transfer agreement would still likely be challenged in Europe's highest court. With such legal uncertainty looming, it was critical to ensure any new agreement would be in water-tight compliance with the 27-country bloc's tough data protection standards, they added.

Yet amid efforts to show renewed transatlantic unity following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, both von der Leyen and Biden cast those doubts aside. They framed Friday's announcement as a necessary balance between people's right to privacy and legitimate national security concerns. Spurred on by heat from their political bosses, officials scrambled to get as much over the line as possible to make a political agreement feasible, with one EU official noting talks this week went well into the night. 

"[We're] pleased that we found an agreement in principle on a new framework for transatlantic data flows," von der Leyen said at a joint press conference with Biden. "It will enable predictable and trustworthy data flows, balancing security, the right to privacy and data protection."

A statement from Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders tempered expectations a little more — saying that both sides had “agreed on the principles for a new framework.” That hinted that work still needed to be done behind the scenes before a final deal is in hand. 

The road to a deal

In truth, senior EU and U.S. officials' co-opting of the years-long privacy negotiations had been almost a year in the making.

When the U.S. president first visited Europe last summer for his inaugural summit, American officials hoped to secure a similar political agreement on data transfers — only to see those plans dashed after European policymakers balked at rushing through a new pact.

Washington, again, rekindled those hopes ahead of the first meeting in September 2021 of the EU-U.S. Trade and Tech Council, a transatlantic semi-regular meeting of senior officials including U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager. But, again, those efforts failed to win over EU negotiators. 

The reluctance of some Brussels-based officials to sign off on a transatlantic data pact — born out of their previous work on similar transatlantic data agreements being torn apart by Europe's top court, in both 2015 and 2020 — finally forced the hand of the highest political leaders to step in.

Given the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe, renewed efforts to build better transatlantic ties in the post-Donald Trump era and the long-standing mutual threat posed by China, von der Leyen and Biden laid down a marker showing that — at least when it came to privacy and data — the EU and U.S. were a united force.

That stance, however, will likely be tested — and quickly.

Despite the political agreement, the details about what a new Privacy Shield pact will include still need to be outlined. That includes what domestic changes Washington is willing to make to give Europeans greater access to U.S. courts if they want to challenge how American national security agencies have potentially mishandled their personal information.

Biden will also have to sign an executive order implementing those changes and establishing a legal framework before the EU can finish its assessment of the U.S.’s new regime. That work is likely to drag on for weeks, if not months.

See you in Luxembourg

Europe's top judges, based in Luxembourg, have already twice ruled the U.S. did not offer EU citizens sufficient protections when their data was shipped across the Atlantic. It will now be down to Biden — most likely via a new administrative body created within the U.S. Department of Justice, to oversee surveillance on Europeans — to prove that any proposed solution will stand the test of time.

Such detail has yet to be published, with officials saying a draft agreement may come as soon as next month. That will fire the starting gun in a separate drawn-out process of ratification within the EU. 

European data protection regulators will have to give their assessment on the decision — and aren’t likely to give the U.S. an easy ride. Though their opinion is not binding, it could well force Brussels and Washington officials back to the negotiating table. EU national capitals will also get a say, and could veto any deal if they see cause for concern. That outcome is unlikely, as governments typically prioritize economic and political links with Washington over data protection concerns.

A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, which gives the federal government greater leeway to keep national security practices out of the courts, may, however, have complicated final discussions. That ruling could allow Washington to sidestep Europeans' efforts to challenge how U.S. intelligence agencies access and use their data.

For now, though, von der Leyen and Biden wanted a political win — and were willing to override the complexities of European data protection rules to get it done.

With legal challenges almost certain, though, Friday's agreement could soon turn into a short-lived victory if Europe's highest court again throws out efforts to strengthen transatlantic ties.

Il programma della CIA che spia illegalmente i dati dei propri cittadini

 Senators: CIA has secret program that collects American data

FILE - This April 13, 2016, Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee say the CIA has a secret, undisclosed data repository that includes information collected about Americans. While neither the agency nor lawmakers would disclose specifics about the data, Sens. Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich allege the CIA has long hidden details about the program from the public and Congress.

By Nomaan Merchant | AP

The Washington Post, February 11, 2022 at 3:44 p.m. EST

WASHINGTON — The CIA has a secret, undisclosed data repository that includes information collected about Americans, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee said. While neither the agency nor lawmakers would disclose specifics about the data, the senators alleged the CIA had long hidden details about the program from the public and Congress.

Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico sent a letter to top intelligence officials calling for more details about the program to be declassified. Large parts of the letter, which was sent in April 2021 and declassified Thursday, and documents released by the CIA were blacked out. Wyden and Heinrich said the program operated “outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection.”

There have long been concerns about what information the intelligence community collects domestically, driven in part by previous violations of Americans’ civil liberties. The CIA and National Security Agency have a foreign mission and are generally barred from investigating Americans or U.S. businesses. But the spy agencies’ sprawling collection of foreign communications often snares Americans’ messages and data incidentally.

Intelligence agencies are required to take steps to protect U.S. information, including redacting the names of any Americans from reports unless they are deemed relevant to an investigation. The process of removing redactions is known as “unmasking.”

The CIA on Friday said the program highlighted by the senators and another disclosed this week are “repositories of information about the activities of foreign governments and foreign nationals.” In a statement, the agency said the programs were classified to stop adversaries from compromising them.

The agency also said it kept members of congressional oversight committees “fully and currently informed of its classified activities related to these two programs.”

“In the course of any lawful collection, CIA may incidentally acquire information about Americans who are in contact with foreign nationals,” the agency statement said. “When the CIA acquires information about Americans, it safeguards that information in accordance with procedures approved by the Attorney General, which restrict the CIA’s ability to collect, retain, use, and disseminate the information.”

The CIA released a series of redacted recommendations about the program issued by an oversight panel known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. According to the document, a pop-up box warns CIA analysts using the program that seeking any information about U.S. citizens or others covered by privacy laws requires a foreign intelligence purpose.

“However, analysts are not required to memorialize the justification for their queries,” the board said.

Additional documents released Thursday also revealed limited details about a program to collect financial data against the Islamic State. That program also has incidentally snared some records held by Americans.

Both Wyden and Heinrich have long pushed for more transparency from the intelligence agencies. Nearly a decade ago, a question Wyden posed to the nation’s spy chief presaged critical revelations about the NSA’s mass-surveillance programs.

In 2013, Wyden asked then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper if the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper initially responded, “No.” He later said, “Not wittingly.”

Former systems administrator Edward Snowden later that year revealed the NSA’s access to bulk data through U.S. internet companies and hundreds of millions of call records from telecommunications providers. Those revelations sparked worldwide controversy and new legislation in Congress.

Clapper would later apologize in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, calling his response to Wyden “clearly erroneous.”

According to Wyden and Heinrich’s letter, the CIA’s bulk collection program operates outside of laws passed and reformed by Congress, but under the authority of Executive Order 12333, the document that broadly governs intelligence community activity and was first signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

“It is critical that Congress not legislate without awareness of a ... CIA program, and that the American public not be misled into believe that the reforms in any reauthorization legislation fully cover the IC’s collection of their records,” the senators wrote in their letter. There was a redaction in the letter before “CIA program.”

Intelligence agencies are subject to guidelines on the handling and destruction of Americans’ data. Those guidelines and laws governing intelligence activity have evolved over time in response to previous revelations about domestic spying.

The FBI spied on the U.S. civil rights movement and secretly recorded the conversations of Dr. Martin Luther King. The CIA, in what was called Operation Chaos, investigated whether the movement opposing the Vietnam War had links to foreign countries.

“These reports raise serious questions about the kinds of information the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans,” Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “The CIA conducts these sweeping surveillance activities without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress.”

Link originale: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senators-cia-has-secret-program-that-collects-american-data/2022/02/10/017b6932-8ad8-11ec-838f-0cfdf69cce3c_story.html