Everyone is suddenly talking about the Deep State – the configuration of spy agencies, career bureaucrats, and overseas spooks whose murky omnipresence has been brought to light by President Trump's contention that he was "wiretapped" by his predecessor.

With his usual imprecision, Trump managed to confuse the issue by ascribing the surveillance to Barack Obama, and so naturally spokesmen for the former President had no trouble batting this charge away. But as a former Obama speechwriter put it:  "I'd be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping. Statement just said that neither he nor the [White House] ordered it."

And then there's the word "wiretapping": this brings to mind the old-fashioned physical "bug" that our spooks used to plant on their target's phone lines, installed in the dead of night. But that isn't how it's done anymore. As Edward Snowden revealed, the National Security Agency (NSA) scoops up everyone's communications, and stores them in a database for later retrieval. Loosely-observed "rules" are supposed to make it hard (but not impossible) for the spooks to spy on American citizens, but the reality is that there are plenty of times when such information is scooped up "incidentally," and in those cases the identities of those spied on must be redacted.

Except not anymore.

As the New York Times reported on January 12:

In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government's 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.

The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data…

And it looks like Obama administration officials made good use of this loosening of the rules after Trump's victory. As the Times reported on March 1, after Trump won they were combing through the unredacted raw data looking for evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign:

In the Obama administration's last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election – and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians – across the government.

Their goal: "to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators." And they apparently didn't wait for the investigators, as a stream of reportage about "intercepts" involving Trump associates, such as former National Security Council advisor Michael Flynn communicating with Russian officials, found its way onto the front pages of the nation's newspapers. The source of this intelligence is the key to understanding what happened. The Times tells us: American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials – and others close to Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin – and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence.