Devin Nunes Messed With NSA's Most Cherished Surveillance Power [View all]

[DonViejo]

Usually, Republicans on the intelligence committee are more than happy to OK the Deep State’s spying powers. But these are not usual times.

BETSY WOODRUFF
SPENCER ACKERMAN

01.09.18 5:00 AM ET

It’s the NSA’s most cherished mass-surveillance law, albeit one civil libertarians consider dubiously constitutional. And the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee helped jeopardize its renewal, The Daily Beast has learned—by resurrecting a pseudo-scandal of his own invention.

In recent months, congressional negotiators have been working on a bill codifying an umbrella of mass-surveillance activities known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The authorization for those activities is due to expire in a matter of days.

But Chairman Devin Nunes threw a monkey wrench into the process, by initially pushing to include in the bill an unrelated a provision on so-called unmasking, the process that intelligence agencies use to reveal the names of U.S. persons who may be involved in crimes like spying.

(Last year, as the Trump-Russia probe began to heat up, Nunes led a sideshow investigation into allegations that Obama administration officials improperly “unmasked” the names of Trump campaign staffers.)

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