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[Neonivek]

So I see Trump has once again manipulated the media to erase any controversy surrounding him.

How short are American's memory spans?

[Frumple]

Well, smj, backchannel stuff isn't necessarily uncommon. Diplomacy, intelligence work, military stuff, lots of things that can benefit from a bit of talk on the down low.

... what is uncommon, and in-goddamn-credibly suspicious, is a major government official going behind the government's back to try to form and utilize it. To paraphrase someone else, the president has a right to secrecy from their public, to an extent. What they don't have, is a right to secrecy from their government.

[smjjames]

So I see Trump has once again manipulated the media to erase any controversy surrounding him.

How short are American's memory spans?

It's not erased, just volume turned down or another aspect being looked at.

Well, smj, backchannel stuff isn't necessarily uncommon. Diplomacy, intelligence work, military stuff, lots of things that can benefit from a bit of talk on the down low.

... what is uncommon, and in-goddamn-credibly suspicious, is a major government official going behind the government's back to try to form and utilize it. To paraphrase someone else, the president has a right to secrecy from their public, to an extent. What they don't have, is a right to secrecy from their government.

Yeah, the whole backchannel-behind-the-current-adminstration is the really shady thing here.

[Neonivek]

I swear at this point Trump could murder someone and get away with it.

[smjjames]

I swear at this point Trump could murder someone and get away with it.

Drone warfare. Though I get what you're getting at.

[palsch]

I'm hearing a lot about the 'unmasking' of some of Trump's people in the news today, in relation to Susan Rice. It seems to be an American-phenomenon; we don't have a similar concept here that I'm aware of. Any chance someone could explain what it is?

So that was Trump's latest distraction. There really isn't much there and it's making noise about a minor point.

But in detail;

There are a number of ways that it is legal for the US to collect electronic surveillance (wiretaps or otherwise) against an individual. Under FISA section 702 (which may be going away soon), Executive Order 12333 or simply under certain justice department law enforcement warrants.

All of these have legal restrictions on who they can apply to. 12333 and 702 collection can only apply to foreign nationals outside the US, while warrants (FISA 702 or general DOJ) only apply to the named entities in the warrants and require a judge (either FISC or DOJ) to sign off on the evidence justifying the collection.

But the nature of surveillance means a lot of what you capture is the individual talking to other people not legally permitted to be spied on. This is known as incidental collection.

The identities of people incidentally spied on in this way must be protected through masking; censoring of any reports based on that intelligence as well as any transcripts released.

Masking, as a rule, should completely hide the identity of such people and so any potentially identifying information is stripped. This can greatly reduce the value of such intelligence if the conversations are relevant and makes any released reports look heavily censored.

It goes without saying that these identities are not always irrelevant. If you are spying on a known terrorist and they are making a dozen calls a day to a guy who just bought a gun store in Dallas that might be relevant to your investigation. The agents who originally collect this information have some leeway in how to act on such information. Certainly further warrants can be sought on the basis of incidental collection, sometimes under a different agency and enforcement power than the original (so 702 overseas collection leading to a DOJ warrant against a US individual). In some cases individuals can be completely unmasked in the original report where their identity is deemed essential to understanding the intelligence gathered. So, say, knowing which administration official has been talking to a known Russian agent in the course of an ongoing investigation into major crimes.

Incidental collection can also be used to warn targets of attacks, although in such cases the FBI themselves wouldn't unmask them outside of the warning phone call.

In this case it would appear that Rice was handed intelligence reports that incidentally involved Trump transition team members. She requested that they be unmasked to better understand the context. This is pretty much normal behaviour in the course of such an investigation. Also noteworthy that if they had been fully masked then she wouldn't know who it was she was asking to be unmasked, then it turns out to be a Trump official...

There are also obviously levels of unmasking. You could reveal the full identity or just show some context to the conversations. It's not clear exactly what was requested or done in this case and there are conflicting reports. Of course, Trump could simply declassify the materials if he wished, but seems to be relying on secondary reporting of journalists.

[Baffler]

In this case it would appear that Rice was handed intelligence reports that incidentally involved Trump transition team members. She requested that they be unmasked to better understand the context. This is pretty much normal behaviour in the course of such an investigation. Also noteworthy that if they had been fully masked then she wouldn't know who it was she was asking to be unmasked, then it turns out to be a Trump official...

There are also obviously levels of unmasking. You could reveal the full identity or just show some context to the conversations. It's not clear exactly what was requested or done in this case and there are conflicting reports. Of course, Trump could simply declassify the materials if he wished, but seems to be relying on secondary reporting of journalists.

This is not true. Unmasking of information collected that way is only supposed to happen in the pressing interest of national security, and requires a FISA warrant. Yet here it was done for nakedly political reasons. If it was done without a warrant she and the intelligence agencies who carried out the request are in deep shit for violating due process. If it was done with a warrant, they're still in deep shit because it shows that they've lied about everything related to this up until now.

[misko27]

editwhiletyping: Wait, Betsy DeVos is his sister? As in the Education Secretary? That's a hell of a conflict of interest.

Haha, oh wow that nomination was already very blatantly corrupt, but now? Ahaha, what the hell is even GOP.

My family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican party….I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now, I simply concede the point. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment; we expect a good and honest government. Furthermore, we expect the Republican party to use the money to promote these policies, and yes, to win elections.

Betsy DeVos, or Besty DeVos?

An in-depth (if perhaps not-entirely-neutral) explanation of things. I'll have to look into it more before coming to a position on if it's a distraction or something more substantial, particularly in the context of all the previous claims - and denials - about wiretapping. Regardless, your post was very useful in following what's being reported; thank you.

For what it's worth, incidental collection is an inevitable problem when you combine laws and rights protecting privacy and any sort of surveillance, much less the surveillance state as it exists today. Obviously an environment without collection leads to no incidental collection, while an environment without laws protecting the rights of citizens just calls it "collection". But since the mandate to collect data in the US is limited (while capacity and desire to collect is very great), incidental collection refers to how that is dealt with, and essentially the circumstances under which that collection is protected. As palsch notes, the incidental collection could be essential in uncovering the larger part of a scheme; on the other hand, incidental collection could just be a massive amount of citizens who've never committed any crime whatsoever (one of the objections of the 215 program was that it collected metadata multiple degrees away from the target, thus almost ensuring that, while any terrorist net would be detected, so would a load of other people with no connection whatsever). So dealing with it is delicate, as arguments here will show.

I swear at this point Trump could murder someone and get away with it.

Drone warfare. Though I get what you're getting at.

Would you say the same thing about Seal Team Six bursting in the door and pumping someone full of lead? Or just having someone fly over in a plane to drop a bomb on them? Does that make it better?

I'm annoyed when objectors to drones speak as if the alternative was the US government not killing people. Sure that's an objection, but that's an objection to everything military the US does, not special to drones; and yet people make the argument as if it were unique to drnes. objectors to drones should explain why drones are fundamentally different from other weapons of war. That's not an unreasonable standard either: objectors to explosive mines made this argument, succeeded, and now mines are banned by 162 countries and rarely used by the remaining countries. If you can't do that, you can make objections to how drones are used in practice, but you can't say "well killing people with drones is wrong".

[Neonivek]

Well the issue is that Drones are... very much suicide bombers... without the requirement to actually have someone willing to die for your cause

[palsch]

This is not true. Unmasking of information collected that way is only supposed to happen in the pressing interest of national security, and requires a FISA warrant.

No, actually, it doesn't.

For starters, not all surveillance is done under FISA authority. Some is under 12333 and some is under domestic surveillance law. You obviously don't need a FISA warrant to unmask 12333 intelligence.

But even under FISA you are misreprsenting the standards. See section 7.2 (page 17 onwards). It's the NSA standards but these are generally representative of a standard legal framework which has only been slightly relaxed since. Notice the non-exhaustive list of reasons, which includes an individual being a foreign agent, involved in various illegal activity, or a target of hostile intelligence activities themselves. If they believed that Trump associates were being targetted (as in those who were meeting with believed Russian spies) then unmasking would be a textbook example of following policy.

EDIT: It's worth noting that the masking doesn't even just apply to those incidentally collected. It refers to subjects referred to in intercepted communications. In the Ben Wittes example in my earlier post it's likely a hacker talking about him or actual attacks on his accounts being intercepted, not his communications. That would still be an unmasking determination, even if it was just two foreign agents discussing a member of Trump's team.

The list being non-exhaustive shows the leeway that intelligence chiefs have in making such determinations. And the determinations are made at the discression of senior intelligence agents. Roughly 20 in the NSA and more than that in the FBI, according to Mike Rogers testimony. Rogers also outlined a simplified test they apply to unmasking questions;

Rogers said that the N.S.A. uses a two-part test to evaluate unmasking requests: “Is there a valid need to know in the course of the execution of their official duties?” and “Is the identification necessary to truly understand the context of the intelligence value that the report is designed to generate?”

The answer to these questions is often yes. “Masking and unmasking happens every single day, dozens of times, or hundreds of times. I don’t even know the numbers,” Jim Himes, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told me. “There needs to be a process followed. It’s a fairly rigorous process, involving lots of review by counsels and that sort of thing.”

So the process we are talking about, assuming the reports are true, is Rice being presented with intelligence reports and requesting the providing agency unmask them. The agency would have then followed their internal procedure to make such a determination and given her the unmasked information (or not) accordingly.

But here is the big kicker. The intelligence in question is still classified. Rice and anyone else involved at the time can't talk about it in any specific terms. Trump has full authority to declassify it.

But none of this has originated with the agencies or groups who would have access to such information. Instead it has been filtered through professional troll Mike Cernovich through his Medium article. I can't see a higher level source than that so far. Instead I see attempts to hold back potential intelligence from outside scrutiny of Congressional oversight.

[smjjames]

I swear at this point Trump could murder someone and get away with it.

Drone warfare. Though I get what you're getting at.

Would you say the same thing about Seal Team Six bursting in the door and pumping someone full of lead? Or just having someone fly over in a plane to drop a bomb on them? Does that make it better?

I'm annoyed when objectors to drones speak as if the alternative was the US government not killing people. Sure that's an objection, but that's an objection to everything military the US does, not special to drones; and yet people make the argument as if it were unique to drnes. objectors to drones should explain why drones are fundamentally different from other weapons of war. That's not an unreasonable standard either: objectors to explosive mines made this argument, succeeded, and now mines are banned by 162 countries and rarely used by the remaining countries. If you can't do that, you can make objections to how drones are used in practice, but you can't say "well killing people with drones is wrong".

I was making a point as there is 'directly via their own hand' and 'indirectly via government or whatever'. Obviously Neonivek was referring to the retort that Trump made during the campaign.

[palsch]

Susan Rice on the unmasking story and process.

Mostly what I described with some more details of how it worked from her side.


Shiff on incidental intelligence collection, masking/unmasking, and the congressional intelligence committee's role.

[EnigmaticHat]

Well the issue is that Drones are... very much suicide bombers... without the requirement to actually have someone willing to die for your cause

The issue of drones is that we keep using them in countries we're not at war with.

Its really not about drones at all, its more about airpower.  Obama's answer to the whole "if we use the army in a nation, might we have to stay there for years" issue was to try and influence foreign nations with nothing but bombing.  The drone strikes on Pakistan have (rightly) become a talking point about this, but he also bombed Syria and Libya without sending in ground troops.

I don't really have an opinion on this, it'll be interesting to see where it all ends up a few decades down the line.

Also unrelated fun fact, predator drones are not suicide bombers (since they survive attacking), but the US is in the early stages of rolling out an RC missile to our infantry.

[Strife26]

That's only the barest difference from any number of missile systems.

[martinuzz]

Also unrelated fun fact, predator drones are not suicide bombers (since they survive attacking), but the US is in the early stages of rolling out an RC missile to our infantry.

Backpack sized aircraft. What's next? Inflatable tanks?