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Asked to define what crimes Donald Trump is alleging Barack Obama and other former members of his administration committed under his "Obamagate" conspiracy theory, the president's top spokeswoman instead focused on alleged "wrongdoing."

When pressed, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany only mentioned one potential crime: The leaking of the identity of Michael Flynn, Mr Trump's first national security adviser to reporters that showed up in articles indicating the retired Army three-star general was the subject of a federal probe.

Instead, Ms McEnany pointed to the highly disputed "dossier" of negative information compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which has been disputed by Mr Trump and his team.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

Ms McEnany, who is an attorney, complained about "wrongdoing" by the FBI.

She complained that Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act court warrants were improperly issued so federal investigators could monitor communications involving members the 2016 Trump campaign.

Additionally, she contended that Sally Yates, a former senior Justice Department official, was "stunned" when then-President Barack Obama informed her of a federal probe of Mr Flynn.

But only once, contending that a leak of Mr Flynn's name to reporters, did she mention a possible criminal act because, she said, such a leak might have been "a violation of his (Flynn's) Fourth Amendment rights."

Cornell Law School defines that amendment to the US Constitution this way: "The Fourth Amendment originally enforced the notion that "each man's home is his castle", secure from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government. It protects against arbitrary arrests, and is the basis of the law regarding search warrants, stop-and-frisk, safety inspections, wiretaps, and other forms of surveillance, as well as being central to many other criminal law topics and to privacy law."

Mr Trump alleged unspecified criminal actions by former Obama administration officials in a tweet last weekend, writing: "The biggest political crime in American history, by far!"

But on Monday, when asked to spell out those alleged crimes during a press conference, Mr Trump could not or would not.

"You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours," he told a Washington Post reporter.

"Obamagate" is a web of complicated and semi-related actions and investigations by and ordered by then-Obama administration officials. Mr Trump, cobbling them together, alleges they prove a push inside the Obama administration to take down his 2016 presidential bid and then hobble his presidency. Mr Obama has responded with a one-word tweet: "Vote."

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Trump's spokeswoman focuses on 'wrongdoing' rather than crimes when pressed on 'Obamagate' charges - The Independent

90.5 WESAs An-Li Herring reports on the privacy concerns that contact tracing apps raise.

If you test positive for COVID-19, a contact tracer will call to find out who you interacted with since 48 hours before you felt sick. Some people, though, want the phones themselves to help with the work.

At a news conference earlier this month, Allegheny County Health Department Director Debra Bogen said her agency is considering how smartphone apps could help to investigate cases.

We have looked at a variety of options, and I think were all sort of learning what those options are, Bogen said. The problem is that there are many. And there are privacy issues.

Experts say communities must expand their capacity to test, trace and isolate COVID-19 cases before they can safely resume daily life amid the coronavirus pandemic. Contact tracing apps, meanwhile, are credited with helping to contain the coronavirus in some countries.

The programs start by tracking location, Bluetooth, or other datastored in cell phones. If the data suggests an app user has interacted with an infected patient, the user gets a notification. Contact tracers could also draw on the same information to chase down other likely contacts, and tell them to quarantine or get tested.

But there are concerns the technology reveals too much about users and yet also not enough.

Public health v. privacy rights

Dierdre Mulligan, a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, said the law allows some privacy rights to be eroded when officials need to respond to a public-health crisis.

And were actually going to make decisions that might intrude on your privacy, Mulligan said, because we understand that were all in this together.

After all, contracting the coronavirus doesnt just risk the well-being of infected people, but also that of anyone they come into contact with. So, the detective work involved in contact tracing itself, and the collection of confidential information in public health databases is legal, Mulligan said.

But she added that privacy rights do come into play when phones proactively track and record individuals contacts before they've been infected.

Mulligan and others say that contact tracing technology poses legitimate privacy threats. Some worry, for example, that employers will require workers to use contact tracing software, while others dread the potential for hacking.

Mulligan noted that some fear police could use the technology to target people who have interacted with a criminal suspect.

People have already suggested, Well, wouldnt [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] like to know that? because theyd be able to identify other people who might be illegally in the country," she added. "You can imagine lots of ways in which there could be pressure to repurpose the system thats being built.

While some countries mandate the use of contact-tracing apps, Mary Catherine Roper, Deputy Legal Director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said in the U.S., participation must be voluntary.

In our country, we dont allow the government to conduct mass surveillance on us, Roper said. The Constitution doesnt permit that. Our culture doesnt permit that.

In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the Fourth Amendment bars law enforcement from accessing cell phone location data without a search warrant.

Roper said when contact tracing apps are voluntary, the companies and governments that sponsor them must spell out exactly what participants are signing up for.

What reasonably could you have thought you were agreeing to? And what precautions have been taken to make sure that this data is not used in ways beyond what you thought you were agreeing to? the ACLU lawyer said, listing the types of questions that app use policies should answer.

'Not a perfect science'

Jennifer King, who serves as Director of Consumer Privacy for Stanford Law Schools Center for Internet and Society, noted that such terms of service often are very non-transparent and could make it difficult for users to make an informed choice about whether to opt in to contact tracing.

My concern is that even if [the apps are launched] by public health agencies, King said, well see a process that looks like what we already see on the consumer side of things, where you get a very legalistic privacy policy that doesnt do a good job of trying to explain to you in plain English what youre engaging in, what youre participating in, and for how long your data might be used.

App developers in the U.S. have made a point to adopt privacy safeguards. For example, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University built a program that alerts users if theyve come close to someone who has the disease, while alsokeeping participants anonymous and not reporting the alerts to anyone else.

Google and Apple, meanwhile, are teaming up to establish a system that will only share coronavirus data with public health agencies and only until the end of the pandemic.

Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Jason Hong noted that while privacy protections are essential, they limit public health benefits. In other countries like China and South Korea, governments have used a host of data sources, including GPS and credit card records, to pinpoint locations. But in the U.S., apps rely on less precise technology.

If you are on the opposite side of a building from a person, or even on a different floor, and you never really met this person, you could still be having false positives that youre actually close to them, Hong said, describing one shortcoming with the Bluetooth signals that apps in the U.S. are expected to rely on.

King added that the technology wont work if users dont have their Bluetooth and location services turned on, or if they simply dont have their phones with them.

This is not a perfect science at all, she added. Its just a way potentially to try to identify the gaps that as humans we may have trouble trying to remember or put together.

Kathleen Carley, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, said that on balance, those possible benefits make the apps worth adopting. She thinks they would help contact tracers to do their jobs.

The contact apps get rid of a lot of that guesswork and would actually make it much safer for people, Carley said. I personally think its a great idea, and that we should be doing it.

Not everyone agrees: Polls show that at most, only about half of Americans are open to downloading contact tracing software. That might be a problem, because experts say 60 percent of the population must opt in for the apps to have an impact.

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Do Contact Tracing Apps Pit Privacy Against The Public Good? - 90.5 WESA

A group of Republican Senators, led by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, introduced the COVID-19 Consumer Data Protection Act of 2020 (the Act) on May 7, 2020.1The Act would address privacy issues associated with certain entities collection, use, and disclosure of geolocation information and other data for the narrow purpose of identifying and tracking those who have COVID-19 or have been in close proximity to those who are likely infectious (contact tracing).

It would remain in force only until the Secretary of Health and Human Services rescinds the public health emergency he declared when the pandemic began. Although the Act is limited in scope and duration, it could influence future privacy legislation at the federal and state levels.

Among other things, the Act would require entities subject to the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC Act), common carriers, and non-profit organizations (covered entities) to give notice and obtain opt-in consent before collecting, processing, and transferring limited types of information (covered data) from individuals for one of three purposes (covered purposes). The Act does not apply to service providers, which are entities that perform services on behalf of and at the direction of covered entities.

The Act would require covered entities to provide individuals notice at or before the time of collection and to obtain their opt-in consent before collecting, using, or disclosing covered information for one of three covered purposes:

Covered entities would be required to publicly commit not to use data for another purpose, except under limited circumstances, and they would be required to provide individuals with a mechanism to revoke consent and then to act on the revocation, either by ending the collection, processing, or transfer of the data, or by de-identifying the data.

In addition, the Act would require covered entities to take reasonable measures to ensure that the data they collect is accurate and to publish privacy policies and issue public reports every 60 days, after an initial report within 30 days of enactment, disclosing information about their data collection, use, and disclosure, including the categories of data collected and entities to whom such data was transferred.

Finally, the Act would impose both security and data minimization obligations on covered entities and direct the FTC to issue best practices regarding data minimization.

The Act would apply to just four types of information: (1) precise geolocation information, (2) proximity data, (3) a persistent identifier, and (4) personal health information.

Precise geolocation information means technologically derived information capable of determining with reasonable specificity the past or present actual physical location of an individual at a specific point in time.

The scope of this term is unclear: the Act does not require GPS-level precision and does not explain what reasonable specificity means. It therefore could include cell site location information (CSLI), which is data showing the location of the cell tower(s) to which a wireless device is connected at particular times and, with triangulation, approximating the location of a cell phone near the tower, within a few blocks at best and sometimes up to several square miles at worst.

As such, CSLI generally does not reveal location with anything close to pinpoint accuracy the way that GPS data does (within five to 10 feet), but it has been deemed sufficiently revealing to deserve protection under the Fourth Amendment.2

The Act expressly excludes the following categories of data: aggregated data, de-identified data, publicly available information, business contact information, and employee screening data.3The last category is defined broadly to include any covered data of an employee, owner, director, officer, staff member trainee, vendor, visitor, intern, volunteer or contractor of a covered entity that the covered entity processes to determine whether the individual could pose a COVID-19-related health threat by entering the premises. This exclusion gives businesses that would otherwise be covered entities under the Act greater flexibility to protect their workplaces.

In addition, the Act defines individual to exclude someone who is a full-time or part-time, paid or unpaid employee, owner, director, officer, staff member, trainee, vendor, visitor, intern, volunteer, or contractor of a covered entity permitted to enter that covered entitys physical site of operation. This, too, could give entities that operate public venues including restaurants, retail stores, and the like leeway to collect and use covered data to protect their environments from the public health threat without having to adhere to the Act.

The Act would preempt federal, state, and local laws, regulations, rules, standards, and requirements, but only to the extent that they are related to the collection, use, and disclosure of covered data for the COVID-19-related purposes described above. The Act expressly limits the Federal Communications Commissions ability to enforce its privacy provisions and regulations against covered entities, with the exception of rules governing 911 calls and emergencies, but again, only to the extent that such laws and rules that the FCC enforces are related to covered data and covered purposes, and only when the communications providers regulated are acting as covered entities and not service providers.

The FTC would have exclusive authority to enforce the Act against covered entities, except that state attorneys general would be able to enforce the Act in coordination with, and with deference to, the FTC, to obtain, among other relief, damages, civil penalties, restitution, or other compensation on behalf of the residents of the State. These enforcement provisions effectively preclude private rights of action.

The Act appears to have been designed to address concerns regarding the contact tracing apps that have garnered much media attention since they were proposed by Google and Apple. The first draft of the Act was extremely broad and would have regulated a wide range of commercial entities that collected covered data for one of the covered purposes. The drafters have taken steps to carve out employers and proprietors of commercial establishments, allowing them greater flexibility to collect, use, and share covered data to protect the workplaces and public venues that they operate.

Moreover, unlike the earlier draft, the Act carves out service providers from the definition of covered entities. This exclusion should be a welcome change for ISPs and wireless carriers who could have been covered under the broad language of the previous draft and would have taken on significant compliance obligations with respect to precise geolocation information. ISPs and wireless carriers will have to be mindful, however, of whether they are acting as a service provider or as a covered entity when they engage in data collection, use, or transfer for one of the covered purposes. Depending on their role in a given scenario, they might be covered by the Act.

The Act could pose challenges for some likely use cases. For instance, unlike personal health information, neither precise geolocation information nor proximity data must be linked or linkable to a specific person. If obtaining opt-in consent from individuals is not feasible, the Act could preclude tracking general compliance with social distancing orders, even when the information is not used to identify a particular individual. Covered entities wishing to facilitate this kind of tracking would have to take steps to ensure that such information was de-identified, a task made difficult given the potential to use certain types of location information to identify specific individuals.

Finally, the Act could portend the new normal. Although the sunset provision ensures that the Act would not last longer than the state of emergency, we do not know when it might end. Moreover, it could be very hard to ratchet down restrictions on the collection, use, and disclosure of information once they have been established and implemented. We therefore should not be surprised if these provisions find their way into future federal omnibus privacy bills.

The facts, laws, and regulations regarding COVID-19 are developing rapidly. Since the date of publication, there may be new or additional information not referenced in this advisory. Please consult with your legal counsel for guidance.

1 Democratic Senators are drafting their own bill to address these issues. We will analyze that bill in another client alert.2 The U.S. Supreme Court held that law enforcement must obtain a warrant before seeking historical long-term CSLI because it can reveal much about where a person has been, for how long, when, and with whom. Carpenter v. U.S. 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018).3 The Act adopts a de-identification standard similar to the FTCs three-part test.

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Protecting Privacy and Public Health: The Senate Republican Proposal - JD Supra

Would you (peace officers) follow an order to search someones home unlawfully in violation of the Fourth Amendment? You have no search warrant, court order, exigency, parole or probation exemptions, fresh pursuit, plain sight, no probable cause to even secure the residence for a warrant, etc. The answer should unambiguously be, NO!

What if your mayor or governor made the same demand via executive order? Hopefully, the answer would remain, forcefully, NO!

Yet what if there was a really good reason, like a public pandemic? Would you go house to house at the demands of a politician who justified that his or her order was meant to facilitate the greater good? Although the illustration is easy to answer for most police officers since the lines of delineation between right and wrong are clear, this appears to be the roller coaster ride we are currently on.

Things have gotten pretty murky with executive orders being issued in violation of several constitutional rights. Weve clearly seen demands that have violated the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, citizens caught failing to comply with these commands have been warned, cited, and arrested. This is becoming a field day for constitutional attorneys defending these cases, many of which have been immediately dismissed.

The problem for police officers is that many of the orders are not exactly defined as illegal until a court says so. In the meantime, politicians are expecting cops to be mindless robots following directives under the threat of discipline; or worse yet, termination.

We are beginning to see it happen, and it should scare the luster off our badge. Its tyranny, and its currently being practiced across America at this very moment.

RELATED:

As the coronavirus takes on political manifestations demanding safety at all cost, the price being paid includes economic catastrophes, which lead to high rates of domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse as well as suicide. Therefore, in reality, the safety protocols are producing extremely tragic, unintended consequences. Some argue the results will ultimately outweigh coronavirus concerns.

That is why the salon owner in Dallas and other business owners like her have said enough, and are willing to be jailed or cited in defiance. Long-term repression of liberty and freedom ARE NOT the American way.

Police leaders should consult with legal counsel as the stakes are increasing, particularly those working in organizations demanding that police officers enforce orders that discard the Bill of Rights.

Peace officers should also consult with their labor attorneys before they are fired for insubordination, as Ive heard many cops talking about the price theyd pay if they failed to comply with enforcement demands resulting from executive orders issued by mayors and governors.

However, there will also be a price to pay for blind allegiance to violating constitutional rights, assuming our republic doesnt crumble.

The following excerpt is from an earlier Law Officer article, Taking enforcement action on rules that violate the Bill of Rights is bad practice.

Almost all orders related to COVID-19 violate the Bill of Rights in one way or another. Therefore, any government agency taking an aggressive enforcement approach, including the physical use of force, should reconsider its actions. We (peace officers) swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Historically, the enemy has been far more recognizable. Yet now it is masked in the zeal of political leaders willing to discard the Constitution as they flex their power with the explicit desire to be powerful.This is more than the slippery slope we often use as an idiom, its a tidal wave crashing down on freedom and the blood that was shed to obtain and defend it.

Therefore, police officers need to reflect upon the substance of the oath they took when their badge was pinned in place.

So, am Im calling political leaders urging aggressive enforcement of rules as our enemy? If they continue to repress liberty, freedom, or the values that created American exceptionlism, they are not acting like a friend to our way of life. As a matter of fact, the more these individuals demand compliance with unreasonable demands, the more they sound like third-world dictators. Hence, an enemy!

So back to my original question: Would you intentionally search someones home unlawfully in violation of the Fourth Amendment? Of course not! Or would you?

Jim McNeff

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What if police were ordered to search homes in violation of the Fourth Amendment? - LawOfficer.com

Everyones talking about unmasking, but very few people are being honest about what that term really means or where it came from.

The Donald Trump White House and its allies have projected the notion that the unmasking process is always nefarious and illegal, though the current administration has issued unmasking requests far in excess of the administration of immediate predecessor Barack Obama. National security state fixtures and Democrats insist the unmasking process is standard, routine, and necessary despite the fact that unmasking has only existed for a little over a decade and was specifically conceived as an ex post facto method to reward and protect what critics say is rampant criminality by the national security state.

Spying on American citizens without a warrant used to be illegal. The administration fronted by George W. Bush and largely administered by Dick Cheney did it anyway for several years. In 2005, The New York Times finally released a story that had been withheld prior to the 2004 presidential election which confirmed the existence of the program known as Stellar Wind which critics call unconstitutional.

The reactionary U.S. Congress, with both houses controlled by the Democratic Party, passed a bill to retroactively and arguably legalize these spying efforts by way of the Protect America Act of 2007. Subsequent amendments made in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FISA) of 2008 ensured that the Bush-Cheney warrantless spying program would stand the test of time.

Gone were the days of law enforcement having to seek out warrants for intercepting Americans communications. So long as the spy agency targets a foreign national reasonably believed to be outside the United States, the government has given free rein, for up to one year, to listen in and otherwise collect all forms of electronic data.

One of the few protections afforded to American citizens who are caught up in such dragnets is the masking requirement, which is mainly sourced from FISAs general minimization procedures. Each agencys rules are somewhat different, but when, for example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or National Security Agency (NSA) targets a foreign national and catches the name or communications of an American citizen, the spy agency is supposed to obscure the American citizens name by using U.S. Person 1 or a named U.S. Person in any resulting intelligence reports.

Those protections are, by design, not very strong.

FISA simply provides that American citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy vis--vis such intercepted communications a legal standard derived from Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

The statute also offers a general definitional guideline:

Minimization procedures, with respect to electronic surveillance, means

(1) specific procedures, which shall be adopted by the Attorney General, that are reasonably designed in light of the purpose and technique of the particular surveillance, to minimize the acquisition and retention, and prohibit the dissemination, of nonpublicly available information concerning unconsenting United States persons consistent with the need of the United States to obtain, produce, and disseminate foreign intelligence information;

(2) procedures that require that nonpublicly available information, which is not foreign intelligence information, as defined in subsection (e)(1), shall not be disseminated in a manner that identifies any United States person, without such persons consent, unless such persons identity is necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or assess its importance;

Spy agencies, in turn, craft their own determinations of how to keep American citizens privacy in place via internal rules.

Thus, those agencies mask. But national security officials and other high-level executive branch figures can also unmask with ease if they merely justify their unmasking requests with a plea to national security or some other allegedly legitimate rationale.

Unmasking procedures are also governed by internal agency rules andof a piece with the Kafkaesque contours of FISA generallytheres only oversight in name. That is, there is effectively no oversight whatsoever. Whether or not an unmasking is truly legitimate is necessarily impossible for the American public to know.

A brief unmasking scandal quickly passed through the collective consciousness during the spring and early summer of 2017 after allies of President Donald Trump alleged that highly-placed Obama administration officials mishandled and leaked surveillance information in a way that led to the improper identification of non-targets implicated in a foreign intelligence-gathering scheme.

Those charges, mainstreamed by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on behalf of the White House, effectively amounted to a dual-pronged blunt political instrument: (1) they suggested the then-controversial idea that Barack Obama authorized surveillance against the Trump campaign; and (2) they had characteristics of specific retribution directed against members of Trumps transition team.

The original story concerned Obamas onetime national security adviser, Susan Rice, who was apparently the foremost impetus behind the majority of those requests for the Trump aides in question to be unmasked after they appeared in surveillance reports of non-U.S. citizens during the final days of the Obama administration.

Again, the names of Americans are initially redacted in such intelligence reports. But the quirks of the national security state reward powerful individuals with end-runs around procedures and safeguards if their hearts desire such knowledge. When Rice requested those redactions be lifted, the intelligence community was more than happy to comply. It is a feature, not a bug, of how such facially sensitive information can quickly shape-shift according to political whims. Thats how the national security state works.

The inner logic is power itself. Democrats and national security-flavored pundits insisted the whole to-do was merely ho-hum; the Trump administration saw red, called foul and screamed like blood at several decibels for awhile. The scandal eventually died down and went away. Now it is back again.

Now, it appears, other key Obama administration officials were part of those unmasking efforts including presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee and former vice president Joe Biden.

And this time, theres no guessing game as to who was outed for being mentioned by or conversing with a foreign surveillance target. This time around, the unmasked man is well known and already consuming a fair deal of digital ink and broadcast bandwidth. And he just so happens to be the subject of Trumpworlds latest passion play: retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn.

CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge posted images of documents that showcased Bidens involvementin the purported scandal mid afternoon on Wednesday. Other high profile Obama administration officials also signed off on the Flynn unmasking decision, like James Clapper, John Brennan and Samantha Power.

Notably, the Biden campaign did not respond favorably to Herridges reporting.

SCOOP, tweeted Bidens Rapid Response Director Andrew Bates in a since-deleted tweet. Catherine Herridge is a partisan, rightwing [sic] hack who is a regular conduit for conservative media manipulation ploys because she agrees to publicize things before contacting the target to ask for comment.

As it turns out, Bidens request to unmask Flynn was made on January 12, 2017 the same day that the Washington Posts David Ignatius initially reported on the conversations via Flynn and then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The Intercepts Glenn Greenwald argued at the time that the senior U.S. government officials leak to Ignatius was illegal. It would not be a surprise if Trumps allies pushed for an investigation. Such a course of action would, of course, have severe implications for the 2020 presidential election.

This was the description of the list of individuals who submitted requests to unmask Flynn:

The landscape here is a partisan minefield constructed out of what the intelligence community insists is simply business as usual.

Former CIA official Michael Morell told the Washington Post that unmasking happens all the time: literally hundreds of times a year across multiple administrations, he said. In general, senior officials make the requests when necessary to understand the underlying intelligence. I myself did it several times a month and NSA adjudicates the request.

Former Director of National Intelligence and retired lieutenant general James Clapper said Thursday on SiriusXMs The Joe Madison Show that unmasking is not at all nefarious.

Well, I think creating that exact narrative as though this was something illegitimate or inappropriate when it is actually a very, very useful tool available to national security officials. And I know that officials in the current administration are using it to a fairly well actually much more than the previous administration, he said. So they too must recognize that this is a valuable tool that serves the national security interests of the United States. Its not at all nefarious. And the unmasking is occasioned by the interest, the objective of trying to minimize the identity of U.S. persons and restrict that access as much as possible. Thats why the program is designed the way it is. So its a legitimate, appropriate and important national security tool.

He also said that the alarm bells were going off about Flynn and that it was perfectly legitimate to take a closer look.

There were actually dozens of contacts with various representatives of Russia. And so at the time our dashboard warning light [started blinking] . . . given the responsibilities of these positions, it seems to me perfectly legitimate, in fact people would be derelict if they didnt have enough curiosity to inquire what was going on, he added.

Civil libertarians and Fourth Amendment advocates would likely counter that the status quo of routinely unmasking American citizens due to requests from political appointees is, actually, somewhat problematic and, as noted above, its certainly not a longstanding feature of American society; it was only constructed from the ashes of an expressly illegal and unconstitutional program in the first place.

So, has the Trump administration found religion when it comes to the protection of Americans civil liberties? Hardly.

In fact, after learning all about the Obama administrations efforts to unmask certain members of their transition team, it seems the Trump administration underwent a Damascene conversion in the exact opposite direction. The 45th presidents national security state has ordered a massive spike in unmasking requests when compared to numbers from prior years.

Former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer John Schindler noted the uptick:

[Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.]

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These Are the Legal Issues Surrounding Unmasking, and Heres Whos Doing It the Most - Law & Crime