The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been secretly conducting a secret surveillance program on Americans for years without Congressional approval. Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, who both serve on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have called for new information about the program that includes data on Americans.

Fox News reports:

Their letter to the top intelligence officials was partially declassified on Thursday. The two accused the CIA of conducting the program  “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] collection.”

The program operates under the authority of Executive Order 12333, the document that broadly governs intelligence community activity and was first signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

The CIA and National Security Agency have a foreign mission and are generally barred from investigating Americans or U.S. businesses. But the spy agencies’ sprawling collection of foreign communications often snares Americans’ messages and data incidentally.

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Kristi Scott, the CIA’s privacy and civil liberties officer, told the Wall Street Journal in a statement that the agency takes privacy and civil liberties “very seriously.” She said all collection activities are conducted in compliance with the law, including the executive order in question.

The two senators called for more transparency from the CIA, including what kind of records were collected on American citizens and the legal framework for the collection.

The CIA released a series of redacted recommendations about the program issued by an oversight panel known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board but in their letter, the senators “stressed that the public deserves to know more about the collection of this information,”