The U.S. Senate confirmed Kansas Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo to be the Director of the CIA late on Monday over concerns from several congressional Democrats, who warned that putting Pompeo at the head of the intelligence agency would threaten civil liberties.<\/p>\n
In an impassioned floor speech, Sen. Bernie Sanders called it \u201cvital to have a head of the CIA who will stand up for our constitution, stand up for privacy rights.\u201d He continued, \u201cUnfortunately, in my view, Mr. Pompeo is not that individual.\u201d<\/p>\n
As we said late last year, we have concerns<\/a> that many of President Donald Trump\u2019s nominees, including Pompeo, will undermine digital rights and civil liberties, and those concerns persist.<\/p>\n Specifically, Pompeo sponsored legislation<\/a> that would have reinstated the National Security Agency\u2019s bulk collection of Americans\u2019 telephone metadata\u2014an invasive program that civil liberties and privacy advocates fought to curtail by enacting the USA FREEDOM Act.<\/p>\n We also noted troubling op-eds written by Pompeo. In one piece<\/a> in late 2015, Pompeo criticized Republican presidential candidates who were supposedly \u201cweak\u201d on national security and intelligence collection. \u201cLess intelligence capacity equals less safety,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n In another op-ed<\/a> a few weeks later, Pompeo criticized lawmakers for \u201cblunting [the intelligence community\u2019s] surveillance powers\u201d and called for \u201ca fundamental upgrade to America\u2019s surveillance capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n Critics on the Senate floor\u2014including Sens. Ron Wyden, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders\u2014honed in on the latter op-ed, which also recommended restarting the metadata collection that was curtailed under USA FREEDOM Act and \u201ccombining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database.\u201d Pompeo continued, \u201cLegal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.\u201d<\/p>\n While Pompeo\u2019s defenders argued that an effective intelligence agency should be utilizing publicly available information posted to social media, Wyden\u2014who fought for delay to give the Senate more time to consider Pompeo\u2019s nomination\u2014drew a sharp distinction between seeking out social media information related to a known intelligence target and creating the database Pompeo has envisioned.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is something else entirely to create a giant government database of everyone\u2019s social media postings and to match that up with everyone\u2019s phone records,\u201d Wyden said, calling the idea \u201ca vast database on innocent Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n Wyden also criticized Pompeo for skirting questions<\/a> from lawmakers about what kinds of information would end up in the database, including whether the database would include information held by data brokers, the third-party companies that build profiles of internet users. He criticized Pompeo for being unwilling to \u201carticulate the boundaries of what is a very extreme proposal.\u201d<\/p>\n EFF thanks all 32 Senators<\/a> who voted against Pompeo and his expansive vision of government surveillance. We were especially pleased by the \u201cno\u201d vote<\/a> from our new home-state Sen. Kamala Harris of California.<\/p>\n EFF and other civil liberties advocates will work hard to hold Pompeo accountable as CIA Director and block any attempts by him or anyone else to broaden the intrusive government surveillance powers that threaten our basic privacy rights.<\/p>\n