Secrets of Unmasking Reports

We have not forgotten that there are still many secrets about who asked for the identities of US persons who were caught up in some aspect of foreign surveillance.  These would be especially nice to know, given all the hoopla about Russian involvement with US Government officials and the campaigns of political candidates. There is a report from the US Director of National Intelligence called Statistical Transparency Report, Regarding Use of National Security Authorities, for Calendar Year 2016 and this report has an addendum that starts on page 11.  The whole report is well worth reading because it shows how many of various types of US persons were identified and for what reason, in 2016 - that was the election year.

I have never seen numbers this big before because it was rare to ask for that kind of information unless there was a a really good reason.  Most cases could come to a resolution without asking for those names.  Our UN Ambassador has already mentioned that she was not responsible for the many requests that were made in her name, making all of us wonder who else could have done it.  I don’t think we realized when she said that there were quite this many - there were only 634 total requests, but within those were 1934 identities.  That is a lot of people.

We would have to wonder why NSA could not have a list of those who did the requests ready in 10 minutes on a subject so narrow as this one.  There are long procedures and limited numbers of approval authorities at NSA, according to the Director’s Congressional testimony.  After they are received, there are equal controls on dissemination of that information within the government.  If the UN Ambassador didn’t ask for all the material that was requested in her name, those dissemination controls would be impossible to enforce.

Something smells bad here.  The politicalization of Intelligence is a dangerous game to play.  It gets very close to the way dictators stay in power.  Whoever did this needs to go to jail and collect no more information.  I’m also wondering how many people actually knew this was going on.  Usually Congress is going to get periodic briefings of this kind of investigation being done.  Who got briefed, we wonder?  There are a few people with secrets that we really need to know.