Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked the Department of Justice Thursday about how often it deploys a Reagan-era executive order to surveil Americans.
The 1981 executive order — Executive Order 12333 — permits U.S. intelligence to share information gleaned from overseas efforts with other law enforcement agencies.
“I have long been concerned about warrantless ‘backdoor’ searches for information about Americans, particularly when the searches are conducted through communications that have been collected without individual warrants and when the amount of those communications is potentially very large,” Wyden wrote in a letter to acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Dana Boente.
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