NEW YORK: A major watchdog has asked US senators to vote against the confirmation of Congressman Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump’s nominee as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, due to concerns that he would use the agency’s surveillance and other powers in ways likely to violate human rights.

“Pompeo’s responses to questions about torture and mass surveillance are dangerously ambiguous about whether he would endorse abusive practices and seek to subvert existing legal protection,” said Maria Macfarland Sanchez , a programme co-director at the Human Rights Watch.

“Pompeo’s failure to unequivocally disavow torture and mass surveillance, coupled with his record of advocacy for surveillance of Americans and past endorsement of the shuttered CIA torture programme, make clear that he should not be running the CIA.”

Mr Pompeo co-authored an opinion piece last year in the Wall Street Journal, lamenting the adoption of the USA Freedom Act of 2015 even though he had voted for that act. The law restricted the National Security Agency’s (NSA) powers to gather Americans’ telephone records.

In the article, he urged Congress to “pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata” – that is, records of communications, such as their dates, parties, and durations – “and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database”.

In reply to written questions from the Senate’s committee on intelligence before his confirmation hearing, Pompeo stated that he “had not changed” his position in support of restoring the blanket telephone metadata surveillance programme.

Despite repeated written and oral questions in the context of the hearing, Pompeo remained vague on what he meant by the potentially expansive and discriminatory term “lifestyle information”.

Published in Dawn, January 24th, 2017