Marcy Wheeler has picked up on an interesting claim made in the CIA’s “We Did Nothing Wrong” report. This report — an in-house investigation of the CIA’s snooping on/hacking Senate staffers during the compilation of the Torture Report — tossed out the Inspector General’s findings and cleared the agency of any misconduct. It then went on to disingenuously claim that it was the Senate, not the CIA, that broke the rules.
According to the CIA’s investigators, Senate staffers accessed documents they weren’t supposed to see, apparently by “abusing” the shared network set up explicitly for the Torture Report compilation. What Wheeler spotted — in a very thorough fisking of the CIA investigative report by Katherine Hawkins of Just Security — is the attempted criminalization of Google searches.