Add to the NSA catalog of lame excuses

At the National Security Agency (NSA), secrecy is their business, so it's no surprise to me that they would resist FOIA requests, even though (theoretically) they work for us.  What does surprise me is how lame their excuses are when they block non-exempt FOIA disclosures.

Recently, there was a report that described how the agency denied a FOIA request by claiming the agency didn't have the capacity for keyword searches of emails between its own employees and others.  This from an agency that collects and can search for data in hundreds of millions of phone calls around the world.

Now, in another instance, NSA responded to an emailed FOIA request by contacting the requesting party to say that the agency couldn't find the requester's correct address.  (Can't make up stuff this ridiculous!)  Read on.

Atlantic Wire wrote, "It's possible we've been overly generous in our assessments of the intelligence gathering capabilities of the NSA. They would have responded to our FOIA request, you see, but they had the wrong address – and there was no way for them to get that address [as the agency had never heard of Google, apparently] but to email us and ask for it."

The article went on, quoting NSA, " ' This email is in response to your request submitted to the National Security Agency (NSA) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office. Your request letter, dated 10 June 2013, was received in our office on 1 July and assigned Case Number 72150. We mailed our response to your FOIA request on or about 11 July 2013.' "

The NSA quote continued, " ' However, the USPS returned our correspondence today, as a “Return to sender – Attempted Not Known – Unable to Forward.” Please provide your most current, complete address (apartment #, business name, suite #, floor # etc) so that we may resend our response to you.' "

Atlantic Wire says it had provided a valid USPS address in the first place, but had indicated that it would prefer to have the agency's response by email.

It looks to me like NSA is pretending to be taken in by its own misinformation.  Reminds me of the old Abbott and Costello comedy routine, "Who's on first?".

NSA Blames Its "Antiquated" System for Lack of Keyword Search

Shaun Waterman, reporting for the Washington Times in a story July 24, 2013 about an unsuccessful effort by ProPublica to get internal email records from the National Security Agency (NSA), wrote: 

"It is standard practice at most large organizations — not to mention a standard feature of most commercially available email systems — to be able to do bulk searches of employees’ email as part of internal investigations, discovery in legal cases or compliance exercises."

Mark Caramanica of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is quoted, “This is an agency that’s charged with monitoring millions of communications globally, and they can’t even track their own internal communications in response to a FOIA request.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/24/nsas-archaic-email-hinders-keyword-searches-offici/#ixzz2a4NVujfh 

Everybody who believes NSA's excuse, please raise your hand.  Hmmm, don't see any hands.  Whether or not this particular excuse is valid, it is beyond question that agencies, state and federal, are slow in adopting emerging technology that would make agency records more easily available to the public.  It is equally certain that Congress and state legislatures aren't doing much to help.