Report: John Brennan Used Private Contractors to Unmask Trump Officials Because Official Government Employees Are Required to File a Report When They Unmask US Citizens

Some are asking what "unmasking" means. Sorry, I should have explained.
When the intelligence community is listening, with no warrants, in on foreign citizens' phone calls, sometimes they also listen in on an American the foreigner is calling.
They say that this is legal, because they weren't deliberately trying to spy on an American. 

This is largely bullshit, by the way -- they use this end-around as a pretext for spying on any American they don't like -- but that's not related to unmasking. 

To keep this allegedly "incidental" spying on Americans as non-intrusive as possible, the IC is required to anonymize the Americans caught up in the spy net, to "mask" them. That is, the IC keeps the transcripts of the calls and can use these "inadvertently" (bullshit!) captured calls for intelligence purposes, but they have to scrub out the name of the American attached to the call, to protect his privacy. 

When you "unmask" an American, you demand that the name of the American you spied on be attached to the transcript of the call you intercepted. You reveal that which the law requires to be kept secret. 

"Unmasking" an American is a major breach of people's privacy -- attaching a name to a call that shouldn't have been eavesdropped on in the first place, not without a warrant. So you're supposed to have a very strong intelligence or law enforcement pretext for doing so. 

Instead, the Obama administration just stared unmasking every call made by Trump personnel "inadvertently" spied on by Obama's minions. 

They did this so that the information could be leaked. 

In his last days in office, Obama also changed the rules about who was allowed to see "unmasked' names. Previously, the secret must be closely held -- again, to keep some privacy for Americans wrongly spied on. 

But Obama changed the rules so that the names could be propagated far and wide in government, with hundreds, possibly thousands, of people having access to unmasked names which are supposed to be a closely-held secret. 

He did this so that anyone who wanted to leak the names to the press could not be caught -- if just one or two people know the names, it would be easy to determine the leakers, and prosecute them. But if hundreds or thousands of them know it...? 

Where would you even start looking?

RTWT.