Market Data 
Markets
Replies to post #118431 on Politics and Money
05/13/20 4:26 PM
05/14/20 11:27 AM
Some Republicans have latched onto allegations about former National Security Adviser Susan Rice to bolster their narrative that President Barack Obama’s administration misused intelligence for political purposes.
A few media sources, most prominently Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake, have said Rice repeatedly asked to learn the names of unidentified American citizens who appeared in intelligence reports in connection to the Donald Trump campaign and transition. These reports are based on anonymous sources, and Rice has neither confirmed nor denied them.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Congress should investigate because if the story is true, it’s strange that someone in Rice’s White House position would request for names to be unmasked.
"You're right that it's not necessarily illegal," Cotton said in an April 4 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. "It is unusual, though. The White House doesn't conduct criminal investigations. The White House doesn't conduct counterintelligence investigations. The White House is a consumer of intelligence. Normally, those kind of unmasking requests would be done by the agencies responsible for those activities."
However, experts in intelligence collection and classified information told us it’s normal for someone in such a high-up national security role to make unmasking requests, and it would be hard, though not impossible, to abuse the practice for political purposes.
"It’s not unusual at all," said Joshua Rovner, chair of international politics and national security at Southern Methodist University and author of Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence.
What ‘unmasking’ is and how it works
We couldn’t find a way to quantify how often national security advisers or other White House officials make unmasking requests, but experts said it’s a routine, legitimate occurrence.
The FBI and NSA regularly produce reports for government customers. The customer could be another investigating agency, Congress, the Justice Department or the White House. If an American’s name appears in a piece of intelligence — for example, if agents intercept a conversation between two foreign nationals who mention an American friend in passing — those preparing the report generally "mask" the American’s name, replacing it with something like "U.S. Person."
The recipient of the report might decide that in order to fully understand the intelligence, they need to know the "U.S. Person’s" identity. So they make a request for the name to be unmasked, and the agency that produced the report either approves or denies the request. The NSA approved 654 requests in 2015, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
It’s not just agencies conducting criminal or counterintelligence investigations that make the unmasking requests, as Cotton said. It’s anyone who consumes intelligence reports.
"The national security adviser, who is a consumer of the most selective and restricted intelligence products, would certainly be entitled to request unmasking in the course of his or her duties," said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy.
AI
