U.S.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been secretly collecting bulk records on international money transfers, it was reported Friday.
An article in The New York Times stated that using the same provision of the Patriot Act as the National Security Agency (NSA) has done for its phone records collection, the CIA mined data from remittance firms without a warrant.
The CIA Program reportedly collects data from companies that move money into or out of the United States, like Western Union, but officials told the newspaper that this does not include domestic transfers or bank-to-bank transactions.
Both the CIA and NSA programs are authorized and monitored by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to the Times.
The news that the CIA is also using the Patriot Act to collect undisclosed amounts of data suggests that the full scale of the government’s data collection operations is much larger than initially thought.
“The intelligence community collects bulk data in a number of different ways under multiple authorities,” one intelligence official told the Times.
CIA spokesman Dean Boyd declined to confirm the existence of the program, but told the Times that the agency’s intelligence collection is lawful and focused on foreign activities, not domestic.
“The CIA protects the nation and upholds the privacy rights of Americans by ensuring that its intelligence collection activities are focused on acquiring foreign intelligence and counterintelligence in accordance with U.S. laws,” he said.
Al Jazeera
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