For more than a decade, Senator Ron Wyden has positioned himself as Congress’s most persistent watchdog over the intelligence community’s clandestine data collection practices. Now, the Oregon Democrat is sounding a fresh alarm — this time over what he describes as deeply troubling CIA activities that may be skirting constitutional protections afforded to American citizens. His latest warnings, detailed in correspondence with intelligence officials and public statements, suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency has been operating domestic surveillance programs with far less oversight than most lawmakers and citizens realize.

According to reporting by TechCrunch, Wyden has once again leveraged his position on the Senate Intelligence Committee to push for transparency around intelligence-gathering operations that he believes cross legal and ethical boundaries. The senator, who famously extracted a pivotal admission from then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in 2013 about the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records — a revelation later confirmed and expanded upon by Edward Snowden’s disclosures — is now turning his scrutiny squarely toward the CIA’s acquisition and use of commercially available data and other surveillance tools that do not require traditional warrants.

A Pattern of Secrecy That Predates the Current Controversy

Wyden’s track record on surveillance issues is unmatched in the United States Senate. His confrontation with Clapper during a 2013 hearing — in which the intelligence chief falsely denied under oath that the NSA was collecting data on millions of Americans — became a watershed moment in the national debate over privacy and government overreach. That episode cemented Wyden’s reputation as a legislator willing to use every procedural tool at his disposal to force the intelligence community into the sunlight, even when doing so put him at odds with members of his own party and the broader national security establishment.

The senator’s concerns about the CIA are not entirely new. In 2022, Wyden and Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico revealed that the CIA had been conducting its own bulk data collection program outside the oversight framework established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. At the time, the senators released a letter they had sent to top intelligence officials demanding declassification of documents related to the program. The partial declassification that followed confirmed that the CIA had indeed been collecting data in bulk, though significant details about the scope and nature of the collection remained redacted, frustrating transparency advocates and civil liberties organizations alike.

Commercially Available Data: The New Backdoor to Warrantless Surveillance

At the heart of Wyden’s latest concerns is the intelligence community’s growing reliance on commercially available information — a category that encompasses everything from location data harvested by smartphone apps to browsing histories sold by data brokers. Privacy advocates have long warned that government agencies are effectively purchasing their way around the Fourth Amendment by acquiring data on the open market that they would otherwise need a court order to obtain. The CIA, according to Wyden, has been a particularly aggressive consumer of this type of information, using it to build detailed profiles of individuals both overseas and within the United States.

The legal framework governing the purchase of commercial data by intelligence agencies remains murky at best. While the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States established that law enforcement generally needs a warrant to access historical cell-site location data, the ruling’s applicability to intelligence agencies purchasing data from third-party brokers has not been definitively tested in court. This ambiguity has created what civil liberties groups describe as a massive loophole — one that the CIA and other agencies have been exploiting with increasing sophistication. Wyden has argued that Congress must act to close this gap, introducing legislation that would require intelligence agencies to obtain judicial authorization before purchasing data that reveals the movements, communications, or online activities of Americans.

The Intelligence Community’s Defense and the Oversight Deficit

Intelligence officials have pushed back against characterizations of their data acquisition practices as warrantless surveillance. In public statements and congressional testimony, representatives of the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have maintained that the purchase of commercially available data is lawful and subject to internal guidelines designed to protect the privacy of U.S. persons. They argue that this data is available to anyone willing to pay for it — including foreign adversaries — and that failing to acquire it would amount to a unilateral disarmament in the intelligence arena.

But Wyden and his allies contend that internal guidelines are no substitute for meaningful external oversight. The senator has pointed out that the intelligence community’s track record of self-regulation is hardly reassuring, citing a litany of past abuses ranging from the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program under the Bush administration to the FBI’s misuse of FISA authorities to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency created to review counterterrorism programs, has itself acknowledged gaps in the oversight of commercially acquired data, recommending in previous reports that Congress establish clearer rules for its acquisition and use.

Wyden’s Legislative Push and the Broader Congressional Response

Wyden’s efforts to rein in intelligence community data purchases have gained some bipartisan traction, though progress has been slow. The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which Wyden has championed alongside a coalition of lawmakers from both parties, would prohibit government agencies from purchasing data that would otherwise require a warrant, subpoena, or court order to obtain. The bill has attracted support from an unusual alliance of progressive Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans, reflecting a rare area of ideological convergence on Capitol Hill. However, the legislation has faced stiff opposition from the intelligence community and its allies in Congress, who argue that it would hamstring legitimate national security operations.

The debate over the bill underscores a fundamental tension in American governance: the balance between security and liberty. Supporters of stronger restrictions argue that the founders enshrined the Fourth Amendment precisely to prevent the kind of dragnet surveillance that modern technology has made possible. Opponents counter that the framers could not have anticipated the threats posed by state-sponsored cyberattacks, international terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and that intelligence agencies need every available tool to keep the nation safe. Wyden has rejected this framing, arguing that the choice between security and privacy is a false one and that robust oversight actually strengthens national security by ensuring public trust in the institutions charged with protecting the country.

The CIA’s Expanding Digital Toolkit Raises New Questions

Beyond the purchase of commercial data, Wyden’s latest warnings touch on the CIA’s use of other digital surveillance tools, including sophisticated analytics platforms capable of aggregating and cross-referencing vast quantities of information from disparate sources. These tools, often developed by private contractors, can synthesize data from social media platforms, financial records, travel databases, and other repositories to generate comprehensive profiles of individuals — capabilities that would have been the stuff of science fiction just two decades ago. The senator has expressed particular concern about the lack of transparency surrounding the CIA’s contracts with private technology firms, arguing that the outsourcing of surveillance capabilities to the private sector further insulates these activities from congressional oversight.

The role of private contractors in the intelligence community’s surveillance apparatus has been a growing area of concern for oversight advocates. Companies that specialize in data analytics and surveillance technology have become deeply embedded in the intelligence supply chain, providing tools and services that are often classified and therefore shielded from public scrutiny. Wyden has called for greater transparency around these contracts, including mandatory reporting to the Intelligence Committees about the capabilities being acquired and the safeguards in place to prevent misuse. He has also raised questions about the revolving door between intelligence agencies and the private sector, suggesting that financial incentives may be driving the expansion of surveillance programs beyond what is strictly necessary for national security.

What Comes Next for Privacy, Power, and Accountability

The stakes of this debate extend well beyond the corridors of Langley and Capitol Hill. As data brokers amass ever-larger troves of personal information and artificial intelligence makes it possible to analyze that data at unprecedented scale and speed, the potential for government abuse grows correspondingly. Civil liberties organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have echoed Wyden’s warnings, arguing that without legislative action, the United States risks sleepwalking into a surveillance state that operates with minimal judicial or congressional oversight. The ACLU has specifically called for comprehensive federal privacy legislation that would limit not only government access to commercial data but also the ability of private companies to collect and sell it in the first place.

For Wyden, the fight is both institutional and deeply personal. The senator has spoken publicly about the lessons of history, invoking the Church Committee investigations of the 1970s, which revealed widespread abuses by the CIA, FBI, and NSA, including the surveillance of civil rights leaders, antiwar activists, and journalists. Those revelations led to the creation of the modern intelligence oversight framework, including the FISA Court and the congressional Intelligence Committees. Wyden has argued that the current moment demands a similar reckoning — one that updates the rules of the road for an era in which the most sensitive details of Americans’ lives can be purchased for a few cents per record from a data broker operating out of a nondescript office park. Whether Congress has the political will to answer that call remains an open and urgent question, one that will shape the relationship between the American people and their government for generations to come.