A few comments: 1) very unusual for a DNI to declassify these names w/o an external request. Despite his being an original classification authority, this declassification doesn’t seem in furtherance of his mission. /1
2) What his action does, and this may be the intent, is discourage officials from making unmasking requests, thus limiting their full understanding of the intelligence they read and negatively impacting their policy judgments. /2
This is what happened in 2005/6 when the first unmasking controversy happened during @AmbJohnBolton’s confirmation as UN Ambassador. /3
At least one Cabinet secretary informed his PDB briefer that he no longer wanted to know the identities of masked US persons out of fear his requests would be misunderstood and politically misconstrued. /4
