At The Hill, Sharyl Attkisson asks, Whatever happened to the 'unmaskings' probe?

She explains,

...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.

...In 2016, very real questions were raised about whether reverse engineering of intel was widely deployed in an unethical manner. A red flag waved when we got a sense of how many Americans are “incidentally” surveilled — so many, that near-daily unmasking requests were said to be made in 2016 under the name of a single official: United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power.

Who else was involved? Then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates, national security adviser Susan Rice, and Director of National Intelligence Clapper. Clapper said he requested unmasking of American names “every couple of weeks.” Apparently, it became so common that Clapper told Congress he probably made some requests on his way out the door before Trump’s inauguration, but couldn’t recall the specifics.

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.

...The good news would seem to be that there’s documentary evidence of all this ... if anyone wants to discover it. There are names of who requested what and when, information as to where unmasked intel was sent, names of those who searched the NSA database and under what auspices. Unlike a lot of facets of the Trump-Russia-intel controversy, this trail should be easily traceable.

Read more here.