FR is funded solely by the freedom loving folks
who love and use it.
Please Contribute Today!
Posted on 07/23/2013 5:25:33 PM PDT by ChildOfThe60s
The NSA is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.
But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.
"There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.
The system is “a little antiquated and archaic," she added.
I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency's public-relations efforts.
A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person," rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.
I reached out to the NSA press office seeking more information but got no response.
It’s actually common for large corporations to do bulk searches of their employees email as part of internal investigations or legal discovery.
“It’s just baffling,” says Mark Caramanica of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “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.”
Federal agencies’ public records offices are often underfunded, according to Lucy Dalglish, dean of the journalism school at University of Maryland and a longtime observer of FOIA issues.
But, Daglish says, “If anybody is going to have the money to engage in evaluation of digital information, it’s the NSA for heaven’s sake.”
Dick Cheney (whom I used to really like) is so full of crap defending this police state corruption.
This country deserves to be slaves if they believe this sh1t.
Good grief! What flaming idiots! Maybe we should be relieved that they’re like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight?!
The media is our enemy.
If they truly can’t its by design.
Put it out to bid....some 12 year old from India will have the solution in a heart beat!!!!
Uh, I think you may be missing the point. This is a big cock & bull line of crap from the NSA. They are essentially refusing to provide emails from their propaganda piece produced in collaboration with National Geographic. And I use the term collaboration with a deliberate Vichy context.
We truly are the envy of the socialist world.....
TOTAL BULLSH!T
These people are way beyond the pale.
NSA is most definitely another out of control agency. No difference between NSA, IRS, EPA and most other alphabet soup agencies.
No Accountability.
Alrighty! Just like they can’t monitor domestic emails. We still believe what the guy testified to congress, right?
Not really. 30,000 employees with hundreds of departmental email servers scattered across dozens of secure locations, often with multiple archive servers at the same location. Further, some users will have multiple email accounts as some projects have their own limited access servers.
The compartmentalization is a result of “need to know” restrictions.
You’re right! I did miss it...hate it when that happens. At first I thought it was satire! It’s difficult to keep up with all this crapola.
The media is our enemy.
grep crackandhookers /var/spool/mail
Sorry, doesn’t compute logically. In order to be a high level security agency which can do what the NSA is reputed to do, they would have the capability for seriously policing their own people.
Logically, no one in their right mind would set this up without FIRST insuring the integrity of the system for internal security. They should and I’m sure do, know every damn thing that their employees do via NSA communication channels.
This is like the never ending denials over the decades by Hillary that she didn’t know or couldn’t remember. If I came home and my wife was boinking the mailman on living room floor, I think I’d notice.
They are liars.
If?
NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails
Anyone that would believe that is an eye rolling drooler..
wearing an Obama for dictator badge..
Yup. I seriously doubt they they can't. "Won't" is probably more accurate.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.