Documents don’t redact themselves.

Ever wonder how things get redacted?  

The  NSA is set up to basically gather every electronic message - whether it’s a phone call, a text message, email or a broadcast.  And it does that with every party clearly identified. 

So if General Flynn calls Kislyak his call is intercepted and recorded and at this point both parties are known.  So somebody sitting at a keyboard in an NSA installation knows the entire content of the phone call. 

But it’s a more complicated than that.  

There are literally thousands of individual with the proper security clearance within the Federal government – and it’s contractors – who have the actual ability to log on to the system that contains the information and read the communication in its raw form.  

To an amazingly large extent, the thing that keeps America’s spies honest is the honor system. 

  

But if procedures are followed, at some point, Flynn’s name is redacted, and he’s identified at American 1.  If that message gets sent to the top layers of the Federal government Flynn is still identified at American 1 until there’s a request to have his name unmasked. 

All anyone really needs to do is to task those guys who do the redacting to let them know when the target for your spying makes a call or sends a message.  If you have people who are less than honorable but have the proper security clearance those top Federal officials can be told what messages to unmask. 

The potential for abuse is breathtaking. Everything that political enemies said to each other, except in private in-person conversations or in snail mail letters, could have been spied upon.

And that’s how all the Flynn phone calls that were unmasked before he made the call to Kislyak.  It want’s the phone call, he was a target from the beginning.  He needed to be fired and ObamaGate was part of the conspiracy to get him out of the way. 

And you thought that spying on American citizens without a warrant was illegal?  It may be illegal, but it isn’t hard … at all.