NSA claims it lacks technology to tap own employees' emails

(The new NSA data center being built in Utah will be larger than the Pentagon)

All news reporters have battled with bureaucrats who offer disingenuous reasons for not fully complying with a Freedom of Information Act request, but the recent incident over at Pro Publica, an outstanding investigative reporting website, may have set a new standard for evasive government.

Pro Publica filed a FOIA request with the NSA, the spy agency that reportedly compiles more than a billion bits of information per day, seeking a bulk acquisition of NSA employee emails. Amazingly, the reporter who made the request, Justin Elliott, was told that the agency could not comply due to a lack of technology.

Corporations of all kinds routinely conduct bulk email searches of their employees’ email as part of internal investigations or legal discovery, Elliott points out. But the NSA, which has enjoyed budget increases of tens of billions of dollars, claims that type of search is beyond their capabilities.

Here is the opening to Elliott’s piece about the NSA stonewalling:

“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 (FOIA) 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,’ FOIA officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

“The system is ‘a little antiquated and archaic,’ she added.”