The NSA is allowed under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on foreign powers without a court warrant. That said, U.S. law strictly prohibits the targeting of American citizens for such surveillance...that whole pesky '4th amendment thing' was a real thorn in Obama's side. As such, protocol requires that if the NSA accidentally intercepts Americans or information about them overseas, it is supposed to legally put the information in a virtual lock box.

But starting in 2011, former President Obama made it easier to access that information, essentially creating keys for intelligence professionals and even his own political aides to unlock the NSA’s lock box to consume surveillance on Americans. Now, Circa has filed an official request asking the Trump administration to declassify the frequency of Obama's unmasking requests related to, among other folks, his political opponents.

Circa has formally requested that the Trump administration declassify records showing how often government officials have searched National Security Agency intercepts for intelligence on U.S. presidential candidates, members of Congress, journalists, clergy, lawyers, federal judges and doctors and how often such Americans had their identities unmasked by the intelligence community after Barack Obama made it easier to do so in 2011. The request follows anexclusive Circa report on Wednesday that revealed that the Obama administration conducted more than 35,000 searches on NSA intercepts seeking information about Americans during the divisive 2016 election year. “The law makes President Trump the ultimate declassifying authority, and we believe the president can answer many troubling questions by declassifying this information, including how often First Amendment protected professionals had their privacy impacted by NSA intercepts and why some of Trump’s own aides were unmasked in NSA data by the prior White House,” said John Solomon, the chief operating officer of Circa and the author of Wednesday’s story.

This request comes after it was revealed just yesterday that government officials conducted 30,355 searches in 2016 seeking information about Americans in NSA intercept metadata, which include telephone numbers and email addresses.

In all, government officials conducted 30,355 searches in 2016 seeking information about Americans in NSA intercept metadata, which include telephone numbers and email addresses. The activity amounted to a 27.5 percent increase over the prior year and more than triple the 9,500 such searches that occurred in 2013, the first year such data was kept. The government in 2016 also scoured the actual contents of NSA intercepted calls and emails for 5,288 Americans, an increase of 13 percent over the prior year and a massive spike from the 198 names searched in 2013. The searches ultimately resulted in 3,134 NSA intelligence reports with unredacted U.S. names being distributed across government in 2016, and another 3,354 reports in 2015. About half the time, U.S. identities were unredacted in the original reports while the other half were unmasked after the fact by special request of Obama administration officials. Among those whose names were unmasked in 2016 or early 2017 were campaign or transition associates of President Trump as well as members of Congress and their staffers, according to sources with direct knowledge.

As Circa notes, revealing the frequency, timing and category of unmasking requests should pose no national security risk but could reveal the true motives behind Obama's requests to identify the names of Americans captured in 'incidental surveillance.'

“We believe these aggregate numbers by year and category pose no risk to national security and will provide significant illumination to the public about the frequency of unmasked or searched U.S. person identities who were either intercepted or the subject of intercepted conversations,” Circa wrote. “Such transparency is particularly valuable given the changes to unmasking rules that former President Barack Obama began implementing in 2011 and the special recognition the 2014 revision of minimization rules gave these categories of Americans."

Of course, this request would seem even more critical after it was revealed last month that Susan Rice, Obama's National Security Advisor, went on an "unmasking" spree in the final weeks of his presidency, presumably in order to find alleged links between the Kremlin and Trump officials (see "Confirmed: Susan Rice "Unmasked" Trump Team").