FOIA: NSA Contracts Stored In Paper Files, Unsearchable, Unindexed

v3rgEz writes "Wish you were a little more organized? Have trouble finding that archived contract when you actually need it? Don't feel too bad: The National Security Agency has the same problem, claiming that its contract database is stored manually and impossible to search by topic, category, or even by vendor in most cases."

Comments

Misleading summary

[Walking The Walk]

That summary is misleading. It's based on an NSA response to a FOI request, worded as follows:

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.

(emphasis mine)

That could be network folders (ie: directories) and Word documents, they never said anything was on "paper". The way I read that quote was that they've got heaps of contracts, stored in lots of directories, and even if they did a search they'd have to read each document returned to see if it was a contract pertaining to the FOI request. They're trying to say that's too burdensome, which in theory gives them a way of not supplying the information. In practice, a judge might decide they should be able to do the search in a reasonable amount of time, and force them to comply.

Re:Misleading summary

[Sarten-X]

It's worse than that. The actual response begins:

This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request of 20 September 2013, which was received by this office on 20 September 2013, for "copies of contracts containing any of the following keywords or phrases: "CNO", "CAN", "CND", "CNE", "computer network exploitation," "computer network defense," "computer network attack," "computer network operations", "exploits" and/or "implants," and related services over the past 5 years. If retrieving the contracts themselves is too burdensome, please provide a list of contracts."

From that, it appears the FOIA request was actually asking for any contract including the word "can", amongst other things. It's probably a shorter list to find contracts that don't fall into this request.

The response continues:

As we have advised in your previous FOIA requests regarding contract data, acquisition contract files could be more reasonably searched if a contract number, company name with address, and service award date were provided. However, there are many instances when contract information is not retrievable by company name alone; some companies may have several locations, or there may be a number variations of the same name based on a name or keyword.

Or, in other words, if you have a particular contract or contractor, they can pull that easily. I'll infer from that that they have a big table of contracts with contractor name/address, date, and number, and those contracts can then be pulled by number from their probably-digital storage, but running a full-text search on all of their contracts for 5 years is not what the database is set up to do.