Senator, who has repeatedly warned against secret US government surveillance, sounds new alarm over ‘CIA activities’

A top Democratic lawmaker familiar with some of the U.S. government’s most secret operations said he has “deep concerns” about some of the CIA’s activities.

The two-line letter, written by Senator Ron Wyden, the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, does not reveal the nature of the CIA’s activities or the senator’s specific concerns. But the letter follows a pattern in recent years in which Wyden has publicly hinted at wrongdoing or illegality within the federal government, sometimes referred to as the “Wyden siren call.”

In a statement (via The Wall Street Journal’s Dustin Volz), the CIA said it was “ironic but unsurprising that Senator Wyden is unhappy,” calling it a “badge of honor.”

When contacted by TechCrunch, a Wyden team spokesperson was unable to comment, as the matter was confidential.

Wyden, charged with overseeing the intelligence community, is one of the few lawmakers allowed to read top-secret information about ongoing government surveillance, including cyber and other intelligence operations. But because the programs are top secret, Wyden is prohibited from sharing details of what he knows with anyone else, including most other lawmakers, except for a handful of Senate staffers with security clearance.

As such, Wyden, a well-known privacy hawk, has become one of the few key members of Congress whose rare but frank words on intelligence matters are closely monitored and monitored by civil liberties groups.

Over the past few years, Wyden has subtly sounded the alarm on several occasions that he has interpreted a secret rule or intelligence gathering method as illegal or unconstitutional.

In 2011, Wyden said the US government was relying on a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, which he said — without revealing the nature of his concerns — created “a gap between what the public believes the law says and what the US government secretly believes the law says.”

Two years later, Edward Snowden, then an NSA contractor, revealed that the NSA was relying on its secret interpretation of the Patriot Act to force US phone companies, including Verizon, to hand over the call records of hundreds of millions of Americans on an ongoing basis.

Since then, Wyden has sounded the alarm about how the US government collects the contents of people’s communications; It revealed that the Justice Department prevented Apple and Google from revealing that federal authorities were secretly requesting the contents of their customers’ push notifications; He said an unclassified report that CISA refused to release contained “shocking details” about national security threats facing American phone companies.

As Mike Masnick of Techdirt pointed out, we may not yet know why Wyden blew the whistle on CIA activities, but every time Wyden sounded the alarm, he was also vindicated.