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That concept is so yesteryear.
Over time, the CIA upper echelon has secretly developed all kinds of policy statements and legal rationales to justify routine, widespread surveillance on U.S. soil of citizens who aren't suspected of terrorism or being a spy.
The latest outrage is found in newly declassified documents from 2014. They reveal the CIA not only intercepted emails of U.S. citizens but they were emails of the most sensitive kind - written to Congress and involving whistleblowers reporting alleged wrongdoing within the Intelligence Community.
The disclosures, kept secret until now, are two letters of "congressional notification" from the Intelligence Community inspector general at the time, Charles McCullough. He stated that during "routine counterintelligence monitoring of government computer systems," the CIA collected emails between congressional staff and the CIA's head of whistleblowing and source protection.
McCullough added that he was concerned about the CIA's "potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent 'chilling effect' that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing."
Comment: Perhaps what's more shocking is that it's not so shocking anymore. The people have accepted that the these alphabet soup agencies do whatever they want and there's nothing they can do to stop them. That's what decades of relentless propaganda and narrative control will do to society. It's their ability to generate apathy that gives them so much power and control, leaving many to feel powerless to do anything about it. But in truth it's the opposite - they fear us and are pulling out all the stops to keep the masses asleep and divided. See also: