"NBC has learned that Rice didn’t — and couldn’t — “order” the unmasking of any American because only the agencies that gathered the surveillance (usually the NSA or FBI) can make that call and the process is subject to rules and reviewed by lawyers.
The bar is high too because there has to be a legitimate intelligence reason to justify identifying the person or persons.
Also, it’s not unusual for administrations to request the identities of people captured on surveillance so they can better understand the intelligence. Former NSA chief Keith Alexander told NBC he routinely turned down unmasking requests by senior officials in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.
Unmasking does not mean making public. The reports are still highly classified and viewable by just a select group of people with top secret clearance.
Rice stressed that point in her NBC interview.
"The notion that, which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the identity of an American person that is the same as leaking it, is completely false," she said. "There’s no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking. The effort to ask for the identity of an American citizen is necessary to understand the importance of an intelligence report in some instances."
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/susan-rice-speaks-out-unmasking-accusations-i-leaked-nothing-nobody-n742486
This CBS article states that Flynn's identity would not have been masked anyway, as high ranking govt officials (or in Flynn's case,a designated official) are described by their titles in intelligence reports.
"The most senior level government officials are not masked in intelligence reports, including someone who would have held Rice’s or Michael Flynn’s rank of national security adviser. They would not be named, but would be referred to by their titles. So, Flynn may not have been masked in the intercepts with Russian Envoy Sergey Kislyak, with whom Flynn communicated several times during the transition period. One way the intelligence reports may have identified Flynn is “National Security Adviser designate.”
Senior officials of Flynn’s level are not accorded the presumption of privacy. If Rice was asking for names to be unmasked, those would have been lower level officials or those without specific titles. For example, Jared Kushner would have been masked because he did not have a title during the transition. White House officials empowered to request unmasking are the president, vice president, national security adviser, and deputy national security adviser. "
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/susan-rice-says-unmasking-of-names-wasnt-for-political-purposes/
= new reply since forum marked as read
