The unmasking process has been a major source of controversy for President Trump, but new figures show the practice increased under his administration.
By Shane Harris Shane Harris Intelligence and national security reporter Email Bio Follow April 30 at 12:46 PM The National Security Agency revealed the identities of many more citizens, permanent residents and corporations who were mentioned in intelligence reports last year, in a process known as “unmasking” that has been a source of controversy for President Trump and his allies in Congress.
In the course of monitoring communications abroad, the agency routinely picks up the communications of U.S. persons, whose identities are “masked” in reports that are circulated among government agencies, to protect their privacy.When the recipient of a report — for instance, an official at the CIA — can demonstrate a “need to know” that U.S.
Alex Joel, who oversees civil liberties and transparency issues for the Director of National Intelligence, attributed the spike in part to foreign intelligence services that are trying to monitor U.S. individuals and companies. Foreign computer hackers have aggressively stepped up their efforts in recent years to steal private communications or pilfer trade secrets from U.S. companies.
The new report emphasized that a single report from the agency could contain “multiple U.S. person identities, masked and/or openly named. For example, a single report could include a large number of U.S. identities that a foreign intelligence target is seeking to victimize; each of those identifiers would be counted.”
The total number of orders issued by the surveillance court in 2018, for instance, was around 1,100, a drop of about 250 orders from the previous year. But the estimated number of “targets” of those orders, which could be a person’s communications or a physical place, went up by about 37 percent, to just over 1,800.
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