Disclosures of U.S. identities in spy reports distributed by the National Security Agency in response to requests from other agencies through Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act nearly tripled last year, the government disclosed Tuesday.
The NSA revealed, or "unmasked," the identities of over 30,000 U.S. persons, companies or other entities, up from around 11,500 in 2022, according to the NSA's Annual Statistical Transparency Report.
The number of "unmaskings" appeared to be the highest recorded since U.S. spy agencies started publishing details about their surveillance practices a decade ago, reports the Wall Street Journal.
"The identities in this single report in CY2023 were not those of individual people, but of U.S. entities associated with critical infrastructure. The approved unmaskings related to attempts by foreign cyber actors to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure and account for the increase in unmaskings by NSA," the report said.
The report comes a week after President Joe Biden signed legislation reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) after divisions over whether the FBI should be restricted from using the program to search for Americans' data nearly forced the statute to lapse.
U.S. officials have said the surveillance tool, first authorized in 2008 and renewed several times since then, is crucial in disrupting terrorist attacks, cyber intrusions, and foreign espionage and has also produced intelligence that the U.S. has relied on for specific operations, such as the 2022 killing of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri.
The program permits the U.S. government to collect without a warrant the communications of non-Americans located outside the country to gather foreign intelligence.