NSA Rejecting FOIA Requests by US Citizens

In case you didn't read the whole letter, it basically tells him that the government makes the rules, that the rules say that these widely-publicized programs are classified, and that if he wants to know what they have on him he can f@@k off. We should be outraged by these responses, but not particularly surprised. They are taking the only stance they can take: you found us out, but you can't do anything about it. The only thing that we can do is assume that every electronic communication we make is being monitored, stored, and analyzed, and conduct ourselves accordingly.

What bothers me most is that Americans can actually file these petitions and receive answers. What about Europeans (and others) who have been spied on by a foreign state?<p>Not so long ago, this would&#x27;ve been considered an act of war, to spy on your allies on such a grand scale. The sad part is, that our governments or either in on it, or running their own spy programs.<p>I really don&#x27;t feel like I am living in a &quot;free world&quot; any more.

This sort of illustrates the striking difference between the American intelligence programmes and the European ones. While the Europeans are not necessarily better, they are at least public and - yes - you can request the information if you so please (of course, you cannot ask them to remove it).<p>I am not advocating the European logging of internet traffic, but I will give them the very least credit they deserve: Being public. The Swedish FRA, the Danish Logningsbekendtgørelse, the German Vorratsdatenspeicherung, etc.; while bad themselves, they are at least public knowledge.

&quot;Trust us&quot; will never be good enough. Not when accused are not able to know the charges against them. Not when you can be held indefinitely without judicial recourse. Not when prosecutors demand ludicrous sentences for accessing a public API. Not when the executive has the apparently legal ability to assassinate opponents without oversight.<p>No. Sorry, there can be no trust in such an arrangement. You want trust? Don&#x27;t have secret courts.

I&#x27;m confused. The NSA has basically unlimited powers under the premise that it does not spy on US citizens. So if US citiziens ask what data the NSA has on them, what other legal answer could there be other than &#x27;none&#x27;? And what secrets would be revealed in that answer, given that the NSA has been mandated not to spy on US citiziens?

I, for one, believe that this kind of tactic is detrimental to the country in the long run.<p>Their objective is clear and a &quot;legitimate&quot; even thus not &quot;ethical&quot; attempt to protect &quot;the country&quot;.<p>However, this only works for a while. While nobody sympathize with your cause anymore, the artificial barriers and protection are useless, as information will leak literally everywhere, since everyone wants to you see you fall.<p>This seems to be a common way for countries to fall after reaching their apex.

Oh man, this is easy. They denied his request because there was no confirmation that they did or did not have information.<p>send a &quot;Hi how are you&quot; letter to the NSA chief, naming him as a party, with an affidavit stating that the NSA does, in fact, have information on you. Give him 10 days to rebut it. Then give him a second letter, acknowledging his fault&#x2F;acquiescence to the affidavit. then 10 days after that, send a third notice cementing his agreement to the affidavit&#x27;s truth.<p>THEN you go do a FOIA request. Include your paperwork with the FOIA request. They can&#x27;t refuse, because they&#x27;d have to contradict your private agreement with the NSA Chief first. if they do refuse, you now have legal recourse in (Secret) courts, because the NSA will now be proven to have obstructed process.

We&#x27;re posting and upvoting links to dailykos.com on HN now?<p>Flagged for linking to blogspam on a site filled with nonsense.<p>Is it that hard to click the &quot;Originally published at&quot; link? <a href="http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2013/07/06/nsa-rejecting-every-foia-request-made-by-u-s-citizens/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tikkun.org&#x2F;tikkundaily&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;06&#x2F;nsa-rejecting-e...</a>

I&#x27;m no fan of the recent fourth amendment violations, but the NSA&#x27;s response is actually reasonable here given its proper mission. Re-read this section, but imagine the requester was asking for information on whether the NSA had collected information about his communications and movements during his recent trip to China:<p><pre><code> Any positive or negative response on a request-by-request basis would allow our adversaries [China] to accumulate information and draw conclusions about NSA&#x27;s technical capabilities, sources, and methods. Our adversaries are likely to evaluate all public responses related to these programs. Were we to provide positive or negative responses to requests such as yours, our adversaries&#x27; compilation of the information provided would reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security. </code></pre> This is completely accurate. If the NSA actually responded to these requests, it would be trivial for an adversary (e.g. China) to probe the extent and nature of the information the NSA collects, just by having their agents regularly file FOIA requests.<p>My main problem with these programs is the lack of oversight and any kind of public controls to prevent abuse by bad actors. I don&#x27;t mind when judges issue warrants to gather private information; that&#x27;s oversight, with a level of public visibility eventually involved. Warrants are accounted for right there in the fourth amendment.<p>But these programs are known, thanks to Edward Snowden, to have shoddy controls over individual analyst access to the information. That alone reveals an institutional bias inside the NSA against respecting citizens&#x27; privacy; if they treated it as a really big deal then Snowden wouldn&#x27;t have been able to gain access to individual information as he has claimed. Consequently I have little faith that justice would be served on analysts or departments who use the information for their own purposes, and that&#x27;s the core problem for me.<p>We know the FBI treated Martin Luther King as a potential terrorist. If the NSA&#x27;s information had been available to them, why <i>wouldn&#x27;t</i> they have asked for it, formally or otherwise, if there were no negative consequences?<p>What does that mean for political activism given today&#x27;s more tightly integrated Department of Homeland Security?

I agree with the NSA here. Any data they give you about yourself would necessarily tell you what sort of data collection methods they use, which would make it harder to collect data about anyone.

Sending a FOIA request is probably a nice way of guaranteeing you <i>will</i> be given some special attention from now on, even if they didn&#x27;t have a file of you beforehand.

I&#x27;m going to play devils advocate... if the NSA released what information they collect on me seeing that information might show more details on the manner that they collect the data. If more details on the manner that they collect data were to become public then the people the NSA should be targeting such as Al Queda and foreign countries might develop techniques to stop us from monitoring them.<p>The argument about we know it exists so tell us more because we already know its there really does not add up. I know that Obama&#x27;s limo has some really cool protective measures, but you know very well that they won&#x27;t tell me what they are or what they are not. Theres a reason for it.

In spite of the outrage, where is the occupy NSA, occupy washington movements? States are not going to reduce surveillance - they have the power and means to do so - and would like to perpetuate the same. Want to preserve your privacy? &quot;Come on!Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!&quot;

When you write an authentication system with username and password you never display an error like &quot;that password is incorrect&quot;, because then the attacker knows that the username is a valid one.<p>Why does everyone here assume that it&#x27;s a vast conspiracy when, if they returned everything they had on you, it would be a giant red flag to anyone who was denied that they were being explicitly monitored?<p>The only way to guarantee secrecy for records that should rightfully be secret (whether you agree with the collection methods or not) is to deny everyone&#x27;s request.

I received the same rejection letter to my request. What&#x27;s the point of being able to request it if they can arbitrarily reject it?

So, NSA became a state within a state with no democratic oversight whatsoever. Is anyone surprised that they crave more and more power?

Add usually &quot;national security&quot; is used to trump everything. How convenient for government agencies to hide behind this.

In short: Entropy. Facebook, Microsoft, (admittingly have handed this information with ease), etc.... what we know is too much for you to handle so for your own protection and the protection drafted by a few is what now jurisdicts what we can and can not say. We (our govt &#x2F; those granted amnesty ) can no longer divulge information.<p>What is key and what is troubling everyone since the jump is what &#x27;they&#x27; are going to do with this information, and what &#x27;they&#x27; have been doing.<p>For a lot of you it is easy hyphothesis what a person can do with this information, for instance it has made Mark a billioninaire and countless others rich. It would be a sad state to see this information fall into the wrong hand(s), so it is my hope that someone somewhere makes the decision that no one goverment should be privy to it for the true sake of this freedom we so vicariously fight for.

I wish all the best for the U.S., but this country has only presented fear and obstacles to my family, and demands loyalty, recognition. I am a Citizen of the World, and it will be strictly incidental should I corroborate with the U.S. in any way. I bring peace and sharing —<p>But I will not be lied to, and I will not be coerced into a lifestyle not of my choosing, and I will not be intimidated. I deserve better. The United States has driven me to a life of constant fear, fear not based in delusion but in the severe mismanagement of its society. Daily I find myself at the mercy of its community, whose fear shake the seat of my soul: beliefs of technological domination, spying, etc. I will no longer provide free consultation, on doorsteps or coffeeshops; nor will I abide the complaints of American peoples.<p>Of this decaying society (U.S.), its peoples will manically accuse anarchism or even the grossest fictions, due to an untrained intellect. Of this decaying society (U.S.), its people must find someone to blame — at which point anarchism becomes indistinguishable from treason.<p>The United States has mismanaged not only its government; it has injected a venom against intimacy, intelligence, and true investigation. I cannot trust the United States to secure my freedom of intimacy, freedom of intelligence, nor can I trust its integrity or investigation.<p>I find it disrespectful to myself and undermining to my initiatives to qualify my identity with &quot;U.S. Citizen.&quot;<p>In any event, most people who look at me assume I do not speak English. You cannot coerce someone into looking like an American, and a majority of Americans only look at me with abjection or fear since I have &quot;wild&quot; dreadlocks, which to them look unkept. In many cities, I am heckled on the street with terms like &quot;nigger&quot; and &quot;faggot&quot;; and in polite society, potential peers are taken aback at my personal history (&quot;You can&#x27;t REALLY be from there!&quot;) or even the mere fact that I am a trained philosopher and Web developer. In many ways I look like a &quot;primitive&quot; man largely on account of very matured dreadlocks, and this society is simply too naive, sexually repressed to allow for people who look like Russell Brand to walk the streets: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADJhErmJuoQ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ADJhErmJuoQ</a>.<p>Every one of my days in public with you Americans reminds me of that interview. Even yesterday some square approached me to ask if rolling up one pant-leg was a &quot;new fashion thing.&quot; I will not be trapped in a country of style-vultures-spies-after-our-personal-brands XOR complaint-ridden-poverty-stricken. I deserve better.

This isn&#x27;t really that surprising, offensive, or disappointing. I wouldn&#x27;t expect them to divulge specific data just because it was discovered that they were collecting it. In fact it could be a really, really bad idea. The best outcome here is to get them to stop collecting the data. Neckbeards sending FOIA requests isn&#x27;t serving any purpose.