I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

If these conversations were regarding potential criminal acts, fine.

That's not the standard. They can be unmasked if doing so makes the intelligence easier to understand.

If you want to keep making the most that can be made of this, follow Eli Lake's lead:

...the scandal is that what she did was most likely legal. It is not outrageous that a national security adviser can discover the names of Americans caught up in legal surveillance of others when there is a threat of a terrorist or cyber attack. It is outrageous that it's so easy to do this in the absence of such a rationale.

The Bloomberg story said this was unusual, but not necessarily criminal.

No, the Bloomberg story said:

The standard for senior officials to learn the names of U.S. persons incidentally collected is that it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything. This suggests Rice's unmasking requests were likely within the law.

Be an angry moderate.

One day you'll finally be able to admit to yourself that you're not a moderate.

ETA: You know what's telling about your "outside it all" posing? I finally actually read the Cernovich post. No one objective would have failed to see the red flags (not about his sociopathy, but the substance). He explicitly argues that the unmasking proves that Trump was "being spied" on during the campaign. You can't see how that's a ridiculous overstatement?