NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails

This is a pretty common strategy. Many companies have poor record retention and backup policies because it's in their best interest to "forget" the things they do. I know of large companies that limit email boxes to 50 MB partially because it forces deletion of old, possibly incriminating email. Government agencies are generally supposed to be better about this due to stuff like the Freedom of Information Act. I wonder if there's any teeth in the act for non-compliance like this?

Who ever thought there could (<i>could</i>) be a class war fought over privacy? Since this means <i>some</i> Americans <i>do</i> get official privacy protections (many also get to walk through TSA checkpoints unmolested), we now know there is now a two-tiered society in the US that has been engineered from the top down to create this state of affairs based on the 4th Amendment.

Administration officials have also been caught using email addresses corresponding to non-persons in order to avoid exactly this sort of FOIA request.<p><a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/watchdog-epa-grants-ethics-cyber-security-certificates-to-fake-employee-richard-windsor/article/2530993" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;washingtonexaminer.com&#x2F;watchdog-epa-grants-ethics-cyb...</a>

The obvious solution is for the NSA to spy on themselves, and then get a court order to &quot;collect&quot; the emails so they can read their own email. Legally.

&gt; thousands of trillions<p>If only there was a word for this.

I&#x27;m not quite sure I get what the article&#x27;s point is.<p>&quot;Government agency lousy at complying with FOI request&quot;? Well, it&#x27;s poor but it&#x27;s nothing new.<p>&quot;Government agency does not use secret spy programme to search petabytes of communications traffic when responding to FOI requests&quot;?<p>&quot;Government agency responsible for many secrets successfully keeps its own email secret, even in response to FOI requests&quot;?<p>Or is it really just the lousy click-bait of &quot;They spy on everyone but can&#x27;t give us a couple of emails?&quot; (Wouldn&#x27;t any journalist have gone to both the NSA (who have secrets and who will be difficult to get information out of) and the National Geographic Channel (who don&#x27;t have secrets and who might be happy to pass on some email addresses or at least names)?)

&quot;Are you kidding me? Our systems are rigged to search <i>everyone else&#x27;s</i> emails, we never thought about our own!&quot;

Don&#x27;t forget that the NSA is, when all is said and done, a Government organization with all the multitudinous layers of bureaucracy. I have no doubt that their electronic mail systems are under the control of an IT staff that is just as competent as any many of us deal with in the corporate world. But they have the added restrictions that secrecy entails: it would not surprise me if the server software is a decade old because that was the version they vetted way back when and it has never been updated.<p>The groups that work in the basement do not have such restrictions: or at least have very different restrictions. This dichotomy is not a surprise to anyone who thinks about it for any length of time.

I&#x27;m having a hard time believing that the NSA trusts it&#x27;s own people so much that they tie their own hands here. Unless it&#x27;s a strategy to limit the amount of internal information any one person can access (?)

If you want to maintain security over classified work, segmenting it and making it impossible to search the entire outfit in one shot makes sense.

I guess they don&#x27;t eat their own dog food.

I know it&#x27;s probably not for this reason, but certainly it&#x27;d be far more secure that way. If each mailbox is encrypted with a user-provider key, that&#x27;d provide the same end result.

Anyone have a mirror? All I get is:<p>A Database Error Occurred Error Number: 1317<p>Query execution was interrupted<p>DELETE FROM exp_freeform_params WHERE entry_date &lt; 1374619759

&quot;NSA Says&quot; -- ma answer to that -- and who believes in what NSA says?