An independent CIA accountability board said Wednesday that the spy agency acted reasonably when it secretly monitored and searched Senate computers last year, Reuters reported.
The board, led by former Democratic Senator Evan Bayh, was created to intervene after the CIA's inspector general said in July that five CIA employees "improperly accessed" a shared Senate computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee when it was investigating the agency's use of torture practices.
The 38-page report released on Wednesday said that Senate staffers "were or should have been aware" that the agency sometimes monitored their computers, in part due to previous "discoveries of [committee] staffers' misconduct" on the system.
Upon logging into the Senate network, staffers were warned that their "use of this system may be monitored and you have no expectation of privacy," the report noted.
The misconduct occurred in 2009 and 2010, when Senate staffers attempted to bypass CIA rules by bringing a camera into a secure facility and attempted to print a secret document from the shared network, according to The Hill.
After the inspector general, David Buckley, revealed in July that the CIA was indeed spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee - rebuking claims made by CIA Director John Brennan - Buckley resigned in December in what the CIA insists was over unrelated events, Reuters reported.
The board said the five CIA employees should not be punished for their actions because there was no formal agreement between the agency and the Senate on what to do should a suspected security breach arise.
"The board found that no discipline was warranted for the five CIA personnel under review because they acted reasonably under the complex and unprecedented circumstances involved in investigating a potential security breach in the highly classified shared computer network," Bayh said in a statement.
In the future, the board said, the agency should create written agreements with outside agencies detailing how it will investigate suspected security breaches in shared networks, which the CIA agreed to, according to The Hill.
