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NSA Can't Search Its Own Email
cycoj writes "The NSA says that there is no central method to search its own email. When asked in a Freedom of Information Act request for emails with the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period, the agency, which has been collecting and analyzing the data of hundreds of millions of Internet users, says it can only perform person-per-person searches on its own email."
As an Exchange administrator, I can say that searching across an entire mail database is absolutely possible, and also very simple to do from the Management Shell. They're either lying, or just don't want to do it.
If I were in charge, and the agency responsible for technological espionage and information security told me they couldn't search through their own emails, I would fire them. Every single one of them. Bam. Agency dissolved, someone go think of a new TLA for the new agency. This is like a Navy that can't figure out how to dock a battleship, or a tax agency that doesn't know what all the valid exemptions are. Complete and utter incompetence.
What's saddest is that this almost certainly isn't true. They've got these capabilities. They're just trying to hide something ("everything" qualifies as something, for their purposes). *Maybe* they're telling the truth, if they've got some custom, highly-encrypted system where emails can only be decrypted by the users. But that doesn't seem like the phrasing used here.
What's saddest is that "we're completely fucking incompetent" is not just the excuse they went with, but that it actually works.
What a bunch of lying douches.
Why wouldn't they continue to lie? Congress, the President, and the American public have made it abundantly clear that there will be no consequences for lying. So, why not?
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