Tim Cushing writes: Trying to pry information loose from the NSA is nearly impossible. The ODNI has been dropping documents related to the NSA’s various surveillance programs, but that’s as a result of a lawsuit, something that goes completely unacknowledged at the ODNI’s site. People requesting a peek into what the NSA has collected on them PERSONALLY have been universally met with a boilerplate response that “neither confirms nor denies” the existence of this data.

MuckRock has been filing dozens of FOIA requests in hopes of freeing up info on the many contractors employed by the NSA. Unsurprisingly, this has met with little success. While it did manage to secure 16 pages on French security firm Vupen, its other requests have been met with claims that no responsive documents have been found. This is hard to believe considering some of the requests are about known NSA contractors.

But one recent response went past baffling into the realm of the surreal in its assertion that the keywords MuckRock sought info on were just too “wide open” to be useful.

A search for overly broad keywords such as “CNO” and “computer network attack” would be tantamount to conducting a manual search through thousands of folders and then reading each document in order to determine whether the document pertains to a contract.

So, the agency that claims to be able to sift through millions of pieces of communications and data somehow claims it can’t wrangle its own data. Of course, the NSA can’t even search its own internal email, so asking it to run a keyword search for contract documents is probably out of the question. But this assertion by the NSA is a bit puzzling, as it almost implies a lot of what’s being searched for isn’t even digitized, as MuckRock points out. [Continue reading…]