Last week began with the tenth anniversary of the start of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about how U.S. intelligence agencies siphoned the personal data of billions of people around the world. And it ended with a stark warning about how mass surveillance has since become even more entrenched in our lives.
On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—the U.S. intelligence community’s oversight body—declassified and published a January 2022 report by a group of ODNI advisors. The report was about how easy it is these days for agencies to buy commercially available personal information, and the experts (whose identities were redacted) warned the ODNI that the U.S. intelligence rulebook is too out-of-date to protect people’s privacy and civil liberties in this context.
