 Batman isn’t the only one who needs to worry about “unmasking.” This is the term of art for when federal officials ask that an American’s personal, international communications be deanonymized. “Upstreaming” is the National Security Agency practice of working with companies like Verizon or AT&T to create backdoors into the internet backbone to use targeted keywords to collect the content of Americans’ communications. The practice of unmasking rose from 198 instances in 2013 to 5,000 in 2020. As this increase occurred, the intent of these searches began to look more and more political. In 2017, National Security Advisor Susan Rice issued unmasking orders for identities of transition team members for Donald Trump’s first administration. More troubling, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power or someone in her office made hundreds of unmasking requests. Nearly 270 of these requests came days or even hours before Power’s service in government ended. Some of these unmasking orders were not supported by any legitimate national security justification by Section 702. Many were not subjected to “minimization” procedures to ensure that private information was performed in as limited a way as possible. PPSA has long sought to learn how unmasking and upstreaming might be used against Members of Congress with oversight responsibility over the intelligence community. So we filed FOIA requests with DOJ to seek answers, including records on potential spying on 48 current and recent Members of Congress, ranging from former Vice President Kamala Harris to now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Rep. Jim Jordan to Sen. Ron Wyden. We’ve yet to receive a fulsome answer to our Freedom of Information Act requests (FOIA) seeking records reflecting policies governing the unmasking of Members of Congress. But the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice has now informed us in writing that “no responsive records subject to the FOIA were located.” “In other words, the Criminal Division claims to have no policies on how it might warrantlessly tap into the identity of Members of Congress in international communications, and potentially the content of their communications,” said Gene Schaerr, general counsel of PPSA. “When agencies spy on the very people who are charged with their oversight, you might think that at least some policies would be in place. “And you might also think – given that spying on Congress necessarily involves the civil rights of us all – that there would be some internal guardrails or training material,” Schaerr said. “But you would be wrong.” PPSA will report any further revelations in our ongoing efforts to dig out more information on how the intelligence community might be spying on Congress. Comments are closed.
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