Despite the ability to monitor the Internet and cell phone activities of millions, the National Security Agency says it lacks the technology necessary to sift through its own employees’ personal email accounts, according to a new report.
The claim came in response from a Freedom of Information Act
request sent by Justin Elliot, a reporter at Pro Publica seeking
to identify to relationship between the NSA and the National
Geographic Channel, which has aired what Pro Publica
characterized as sympathetic documentaries on the secretive
intelligence entity.
“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 Elliot,
adding that the current system is “a little antiquated and
archaic.”
In a trailer for the National Geographic Channel documentary
entitled Inside the NSA: America’s Cyber Secrets, an NSA official
described the agency as “energy central” and “the
emergency room” to gain intelligence for American decision
makers.
“Back in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s we had an adversary: it was
the Soviet Union,” Dickie George, a former NSA technical
director, says in the documentary. “They were very much like
us: same intent, same motivation, same kind of capabilities and
resources. There was a line in the sand, you didn’t go beyond
that line. Today’s world is completely different.”
Elliot wrote that the NSA’s FOIA officer contacted him again days
after the request to ask that he narrow it to a “person by
person” approach for the Agency’s 30,000 employees rather than a
broader request for National Geographic-related
correspondence.
“It’s just baffling,” said Mark Caramanica of the
Reporters Committee for the 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.”
Pro Publica’s case is hardly unique. Since former NSA contractor
Edward Snowden revealed the true, shocking and indiscriminate
scope of government surveillance, the agency has been inundated
with requests from citizens demanding to know what, if any, of
their own information has been collected.
Clayton Seymour, a 26-year-old IT specialist who lives in Ohio,
told the Tikkun Daily, a progressive blog, that he submitted a
FOIA request but was quickly denied under an exception to NSA’s
FOIA policy, authorized by US President Barack Obama in
2009.
“Thus, your request is denied pursuant to the first exemption
of the FOIA, which provides that the FOIA does not apply to
matters that are specifically authorized under criteria
established by an Executive Order to be kept secret in the
interest of national defense or foreign relations and are
properly classified pursuant to such Executive Order,” stated
the denial.
The order in question allows the NSA to refuse to disclose
information if is collected covertly, a rule still in effect —
and presumably relied upon – after the Snowden leak.
“I am a generally law abiding citizen with nothing I can think
of that would require monitoring, but I wanted to know if I was
having data collected about me and if so, what,” Seymour told
Tikkun Daily. “When I got the declined letter, I was furious.
I feel betrayed.”
Republished with permission from: RT