Sharp Increase In NSA ‘Unmasking’ Of U.S. Identities [Infographic]

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According to a report released earlier this week, there has been a sharp increase in the number of identities of U.S. persons revealed by the National Security Agency (NSA). The process is known as "unmasking" and the term "U.S. persons" takes into account the identities of citizens, permanent residents and corporations who were mentioned in intelligence reports. Generally, when the NSA distributes a report to other government agencies such as the CIA or FBI, identities are blacked out and "masked". However, officials who receive the reports can demonstrate "a need to know" and request the identities from the NSA in order to understand the intelligence.

In the 12-month period from September 2015 to August 2016, the NSA granted 9,217 such requests and that increased slightly to 9,529 in 2017. Last year, the number of unmasking requests that were granted sharply increased by around 75% to 16,721. Alex Joel, who oversees civil liberties and transparency issues for the Director of National Intelligence, attributed the spike to aggressive attempts from foreign intelligence agencies and hackers to monitor or steal information from U.S. persons and companies that needed identification.

The report also showed a steady increase in the number of foreigners targeted for warrantless surveillance under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. While there were 129,080 targets for that surveillance in 2017, there was in increase to 164,770 last year. While the number of phone records collected by the NSA skyrocketed from 151.2 million in 2016 to 545.4 million in 2017, there was a noticeable decrease to 434.2 million last year.

*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)