What about their finances? That immediately came to mind. Do they make their receipts of spent taxpayer money public as required by the law of the land?
Actually yes. The public usually doesn't get to see the receipts for a few years, but eventually they become public record. That's how we know about all of the cash that vanished in Iraq. The have an accounting office like every other government agency (as required by law), and their budget for 2015 is estimated at $50 billion.
Some noble folks blew the whistle while others tortured people.
You missed the point. The White House and Congress signed off on torture, it was the CIA that was not happy about it and leaked it. In short, the CIA stood up for the Constitution and morality.
An assumption to say it was the last time they crossed the line. You don't consider hacking and spying on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee to be a crime?
It was a shared network set up for the witch-hunt, I mean investigation on the interrogation program. So it wasn't hacked, just misused. I call it a witch-hunt because everyone involved in the Senate already knew about the program and approved it before hand.
While they did suffer from what you said, it is an assumption to say that from 1990 until the end of the decade that they did not operate domestically at all.
It's not an assumption, I have sited a few of the many times that the CIA has leaked information about its activities to the press when its employees felt, or knew lines were being crossed.
Steering this back to the topic, the fact that we know that the CIA and FBI knew as much as they did about the 9-11 hijackers is testament to integrity of the Americans who work for those entities. Every time the elected leadership threw up a stone wall a memo was leaked to the press. These leaks have had the unique situation of being confirmed by the Snowden files, and the Manning leak where everything including the kitchen sink was cast out into the public domain.
What Truther's and CT-loons ignore is that the CIA does not initiate operations on its own. They are guided by the White House NSC, the House, and the Senate. The other aspect ignored is that the FBI, DEA, BATF, and DOE all have ongoing intelligence gathering operations within CONUS, and all of them are good at what they do. If you think the competition between the CIA and FBI over Alec Station was bad, try throwing the rest of those agencies into the mix. They're all competing for funding, and would love to stick it to the CIA if it meant more $$ for their budgets. Where the CIA does work within the US it does so under the supervision of one of these other agencies (CIA and DEA often work together along the US/Mexico border with FBI and Customs).
In short, that's a lot of eyeballs and smartphones for the CIA to dodge. They don't possess magic powers, and since in the end they are just another government agency they are targeted by other government agencies hoping to steal some of their turf (and the funding that goes with it).