Charlie Savage reports:
Intelligence officials asked the National Security Agency to unmask the identities of Americans in surveillance-based intelligence reports 16,721 times last year — a significant rise from a year earlier, a new report revealed on Tuesday.
But the N.S.A. also collected fewer logs of Americans’ phone calls and text messages for analysis by counterterrorism officials via a troubled system created in 2015 to replace the agency’s once-secret program for collecting domestic calling records in bulk. The law that authorizes that system, the U.S.A. Freedom Act, is set to expire at the end of this year.
Read more on The New York Times.