We now know so much about the hijinks of the postwar American national security state, we tend to forget that wasn’t always the case. The COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra programs, FBI attempts to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr, disruption of antiwar and other activist groups, a list of dissidents to round up and detain, vast spying on citizens and the press — many of us might be able to rattle off these outrages off the top of our heads now, but were it not for some intrepid reporters and the Church and Pike Committees in the 1970s, the American public would have stayed blissfully unaware any of it had ever even happened.

It’s food for thought ever since we learned last Thursday that the CIA has been carrying out its own bulk surveillance program that crossed over to the domestic front, stretching, if not outright violating, the legal ban on the agency carrying out domestic operations. The revelation came from a April 2021 letter, made public on Thursday, from Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), calling on the CIA to make “extensive declassifications” about the program, along the lines of earlier declassifications of NSA and FBI spying programs.

While the letter is heavily redacted, it gives us some strands of information. The senators run through the history, entirely blacked out, of Congress’ attempts “to limit and, in some cases, prohibit the warrantless collection of Americans’ records,” and notes that the CIA’s bulk data collection was going on “throughout this period.” This suggests the agency was collecting data on Americans at least as early as May 2014, when the House passed the USA Freedom Act to rein in NSA surveillance, and possibly even earlier when the bill was first introduced in October 2013.