U.S. citizens who aren’t accused of crimes are entitled to strong constitutional privacy protections. So, to alleviate worries that citizens’ rights might be violated through “incidental” spying on foreign targets, the intel agencies adopted strict rules. At first, they promised to destroy any “incidental” intelligence they collected. Later, they decided to store it — for a short time — but promised that the names of the U.S. citizens would be “masked,” or hidden, even internally.

Then, they argued that they needed to store the information on U.S. citizens a little longer, and might occasionally need to “unmask” or reveal their names. Still, “unmasking” was supposed to be extraordinarily rare, requiring a high-ranking official’s approval accompanied by a strong legal argument that the citizen’s name is crucial to addressing some national-security threat.

But several years ago, intel insiders tell me, the process was corrupted. Here’s how:

An official who is a bad actor may want to monitor a U.S. citizen — say, a political enemy or a journalist — but knows he could never get wiretap approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). So he develops a pretext to wiretap a foreigner or a target in contact with that citizen. He then “incidentally” captures the citizen’s information, too. Later, he builds a case for “unmasking” the U.S. citizen’s name, supposedly for national security or other crucial reasons.

Here’s the best part — for the bad actors. The U.S. citizens are usually none the wiser. The surveillance isn’t intended to build a criminal case; it’s to collect dirt or political intel or blackmail material. So the corrupt process is never scrutinized in a U.S. court.

Think of it as reverse engineering of intel.

Rice initially claimed she knew nothing about the unmasking of surveilled Trump associates. Later, she admitted on MSNBC that she had asked for names of U.S. citizens previously masked in intelligence reports.

Add to all this the report that, during 2016, the Obama administration vastly expanded its searches for information about Americans in the National Security Agency (NSA) database. In 2013, there were 9,500 searches involving 198 Americans. In 2016, that escalated to 30,355 searches of 5,288 Americans.

Sure, it’s possible all that spying on U.S. citizens, all those unmaskings, were on the up and up.

But what if my sources are correct and at least some of these actions are not on the up and up? After all, our intel agencies have gotten caught in significant abuses, despite FBI Director Christopher Wray incorrectly testifiying to the contrary.

In 2016, an inspector general found “widespread” abuse of key provisions designed to protect Americans. A FISC judge found so many violations that he described them as an institutional “lack of candor” and “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”