Two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have raised concerns about how the CIA has handled Americans’ information collected incidentally as part of the agency’s foreign surveillance programs, in what the lawmakers say amounts to “serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans.”

In a letter to CIA Director Bill Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines dated April 13, 2021, and declassified on Thursday, Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico allege that the CIA has “secretly conducted its own bulk program … entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection.”…

In 2021, the watchdog Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board delivered to Congress two reports assessing the impact that two CIA programs had on American privacy and civil liberties, and whether the programs followed existing laws and policies. Heinrich and Wyden, in their now-declassified letter, claim that the reports showed that “the nature and full extent of the CIA’s collection was withheld” from the Intelligence Committee and urged that the materials be made public.