Devin Nunes Messed With NSA's Most Cherished Surveillance Power

[DonViejo]

Usually, Republicans on the intelligence committee are more than happy to OK the Deep State’s spying powers. But these are not usual times.

BETSY WOODRUFF
SPENCER ACKERMAN

01.09.18 5:00 AM ET

It’s the NSA’s most cherished mass-surveillance law, albeit one civil libertarians consider dubiously constitutional. And the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee helped jeopardize its renewal, The Daily Beast has learned—by resurrecting a pseudo-scandal of his own invention.

In recent months, congressional negotiators have been working on a bill codifying an umbrella of mass-surveillance activities known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The authorization for those activities is due to expire in a matter of days.

But Chairman Devin Nunes threw a monkey wrench into the process, by initially pushing to include in the bill an unrelated a provision on so-called unmasking, the process that intelligence agencies use to reveal the names of U.S. persons who may be involved in crimes like spying.

(Last year, as the Trump-Russia probe began to heat up, Nunes led a sideshow investigation into allegations that Obama administration officials improperly “unmasked” the names of Trump campaign staffers.)

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/devin-nunes-messed-with-nsas-most-cherished-surveillance-power?ref=home

[MiniMe]

1. Any hope that this tool will be out in 2018?

I can always hope, but doubt he will lose.

[barbtries]

2. what do you think they've got on nunes?

or is he a bona fide member of the trump cult. i like to speculate about these things.

[salin]

3. More the former (true trumpioid), but possibly also the latter

there was a story last Spring about Russian connections/business tied to his winery business - or so I think I recall something like that.

[onecaliberal]

4. Hes in my district. CA22. We do have a candidate to run against him, but the big farms here

love them some Russian loving criminal Nunes. It is a very red district.