THE ADMISSION DEFENSE:

As [Michael Rogers, the director of the N.S.A., ] explained in his March 20th testimony, the first step is to determine whether the intercepted communication has "intelligence value." He said, "We'll ask ourselves, is there criminal activity involved, is there a threat, potential threat or harm to U.S. individuals being discussed in a conversation." If the N.S.A. determines that the information doesn't have value, it purges the data. If it determines that it does, it masks the identity of the Americans before circulating the intelligence. If a policymaker wants to unmask the identity of a redacted name that she comes across in a report, so she can better understand the intelligence, she can make that request to the N.S.A. [...]

Rogers said that the N.S.A. uses a two-part test to evaluate unmasking requests: "Is there a valid need to know in the course of the execution of their official duties?" and "Is the identification necessary to truly understand the context of the intelligence value that the report is designed to generate?"

The answer to these questions is often yes. "Masking and unmasking happens every single day, dozens of times, or hundreds of times. I don't even know the numbers," Jim Himes, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told me. "There needs to be a process followed. It's a fairly rigorous process, involving lots of review by counsels and that sort of thing."

At 7:23 on Sunday evening, the conservative internet personality Mike Cernovich tweeted that former national security adviser Susan Rice had requested the "unmasking" of Americans connected to the Trump campaign who were incidentally mentioned in surveillance readouts. At 7:30, the owner of the Twitter account MicroMagicJingleTM noticed, and began blasting out dozens of tweets and retweets about the story.

"Would be nice to get 'Susan Rice' trending," he tweeted at 8:16. And then he made exactly that happen.

MicroMagicJingleTM is the latest incarnation of MicroChip, a notorious pro-Trump Twitter ringleader once described by a Republican strategist as the "Trumpbot overlord." He has been suspended from the service so frequently, he can't recall the exact number of times. A voluminous tweeter, his specialty is making hashtags trend. Over the next 24 hours, following his own call to arms, MicroChip tweeted or retweeted more than 300 times about Rice, including everything from a photoshopped image of Donald Trump eating her head out of a taco bowl to demands that she die in jail, and almost always accompanied by the tag #SusanRice. Meanwhile, in massive threaded tweets and DM groups, he implored others to do likewise.

By 9 a.m. Monday, the tag was being tweeted nearly 20,000 times an hour, and was trending on Twitter; by 11 a.m., 34,000 an hour.

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